


First Rule of Time Travel

by greenglowsgold



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: (If you've seen 1x15 you know what I mean), Character death technically but also technically not, Major Character Injury, Multi, Permanent Injury, show-level violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-24
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-03-19 10:30:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3606825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenglowsgold/pseuds/greenglowsgold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barry had seen enough movies to know what to do and what not to do when time travel was involved. No meddling where you didn't have to, no blabbing about it to everyone who'd listen, and definitely no telling people about their futures. But above all that was a basic law of the universe: There are some things you just can't change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> About the story and spoilers: This is going to be in parts (I wanna say 3 but that may change), and normally I don't like to post WIPs, but I wanted to get at least the first part up before tonight's new episode. The story takes off right at the end of 1x15 'Out of Time' with just a slight twist in that Caitlin got back to the lab a little quicker. I took some bits from the promo for 1x16 but didn't bother to stay entirely true to it, so this is mostly going to disregard everything but the basic premise of that episode.
> 
> About the ships: The Westallen here is, for the most part, out of focus or non-optimistic, so if you're here for that tag, you may be disappointed. The Barry/Cisco is much more the theme of the fic, though even that stays in a decidedly pre-relationship zone.
> 
> About the warnings: I'm gonna assume you've seen 1x15 and know why I wrote my own warning for character death rather than going with the standard Major Character Death. The Flash seems to be writing its own fix-it fic, but I wanted to write one too, so. Here we are. (The major character injury refers both to a major character and a major injury, just fyi.)

If Barry Allen had gotten the power to stop time instead of incredible speed, this was the moment he would have chosen to live in forever.

As it was, all he could do was enjoy the few precious seconds that Iris’ lips pressed against his, feel out the corners of her smile, brush the hair back from her cheeks. This was everything he’d waited years for, and as soon as he pulled away, the world reminded him that he should have waited longer. The tsumani, crap, he should have called Caitlin right away. His hand fell away from Iris’ face as she turned to watch the wave headed toward them.

“Where did that even come from?” he heard her say as the phone rang. He watched her hair whipping in the wind, growing stronger every second as Mardon’s power built, as Caitlin _didn’t answer her phone_. Why wasn’t she picking up?

Was he speeding up without noticing? Maybe he hadn’t given her enough time to answer— But, no, there was her voicemail. Barry dialed again.

“Come on, come on,” he muttered under his breath. The wave was getting closer. Even with his speed, he needed to get going _now_. Joe might already be — _no don’t think about that_.

“Barry?”

“Caitlin.” Finally. She sounded odd over the phone, distorted. Was she in a tunnel? No, focus.

“I’m. I can’t—”

“No time for that now, there’s a tsunami headed for—”

“Barry.” There was a sharp crackling across the line, and Barry paused, listening more carefully, before: “Barry, Cisco’s dead.”

The noise came again, this time clearly a sob. Barry hardly heard it, couldn’t force his ears or anything else to work properly. His voice, when it came, was too quiet. “What?”

“At the lab,” Caitlin continued, as if Barry had asked for details. She was drawing in shaky breaths between every other word. “He was here alone, he was—  looking into Dr. Wells. Oh, God, I shouldn’t have left him alone.”

Somewhere in the background, what felt like a great distance away, Iris had noticed his call, and was tugging frantically on his arm to try to get his attention. “Barry, what is it? Is it Dad?” He wasn’t sure what she saw on his face to make her look so terrified, but he couldn’t worry about it right now. He took an impossible step back, away from her grasping fingers.

“What happened?” he repeated, or maybe he said it for the first time. Had he said that, yet?

“There’s no wound, there’s no—” A clatter, as Caitlin’s voice faded out, and then some fumbling. She must have dropped the phone; maybe her hands were shaking as badly as her voice. “No head trauma. I don’t know what could’ve— A tsunami?”

Barry couldn’t process the last part of that for several seconds. The what? Oh, right, the giant wave, the one that was going to kill people, an awful lot of people. “Yeah.” He swallowed. “It’s big. I have to stop it.” Save who you can, wasn’t that the line?

“A vortex barrier. Um.” She drew in a deep breath. “A wall of wind, to zap the energy, but I don’t know if you can run that fast. I don’t know…”

“I can do it,” he said. He would. “I’m coming. After.”

“I’ll stay with him.”

He hung up the phone. Or dropped it, maybe. He wasn’t sure. Either way, he wasn’t using it anymore.

“Barry, _God_ , what was…”

“I have to go,” he said, hating how Iris looked even more panicked at his words. He wanted to go back, to be kissing her again, kissing her and smiling while his friend was dead on the floor of the lab. Jesus, no. He couldn’t do this all at once. The tsunami, first. “I’m sorry.”

If there was one lucky thing about today (just the one, he was sure, out of everything else that had gone spectacularly wrong), it was that he’d thought ahead, had guessed he’d need quick access to the suit. He spared a moment to tell Iris to run, unwilling to look closely at her reaction as he sped away.

A wall of wind. He could do it, he could definitely do it. He just had to run faster.

Back and forth, up and down the coastline, everywhere the rising curl of water would impact the shore. _Faster_ , he thought. _Must go faster_.  Even though Cisco was already dead and Joe might be dead and Iris, God, would she hate him? If her father were killed by a metahuman, almost certainly yes. He was losing track of what direction he was going; he must have passed that bench already this time around. _Must go **faster**_.

He thought maybe he screamed, and then it was night, and he was running by buildings, and he was sure he saw himself. _What..._

Barry skidded to a stop. Where was he? Had he taken a wrong turn? He needed to get back to the coastline, but it was night already, he’d missed it somehow and the city was still here. Cars passed. A man flipped a neon sign too fast to see what it advertised. A familiar-looking woman tried in vain to hail a taxi, shouting that she was going to be late.

Wait.

  


 

The first thing you did when you went back in time, Barry knew, was find the people you loved. But he was the (second) fastest man alive, and he could get a lot done in the first few seconds. So the first thing he did was check the date and time, and then he took a little time to himself to think, _this isn’t possible_.

And even if it was, then where was he? The other him. Barry had seen him, himself, running, and then he’d stopped in the square, just like he had two nights ago, and there was only one of him. It hadn’t taken long to get to the morgue after that; he should be hearing voices over the comm. “ _What’s going on? What do you see?_ ” “ _A dead body._ ”

Barry swallowed. There was nothing. He tagged the earpiece gently; maybe it had gotten disconnected somehow? Who knew what time travel could mess up. He cleared his throat, and tried, quietly: “Cisco?”

“Barry?” The voice came strong and sure over the mic, and Barry felt all the breath rush out of his body at once. “What’s up, dude. Still on your way to the morgue?” All of a sudden, Barry was sure he was going to fall over. He had to steady himself against a light-post just to keep his feet underneath him. He’d only been told a few minutes ago that Cisco was dead, and now there he was again, talking in his ear like it had never even…

It _never happened_.

A sharp, desperate laugh punched out of Barry’s chest. Captain Singh unconscious in a hospital bed? Never happened. Joe missing, alive only on Mardon’s word? Never happened. Caitlin finding Cisco’s body in the lab? Never. Happened.

“Uh, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Barry said, high and breathy. “ _Yeah_.”

“Okay…” Cisco said uncertainly. “‘Cause, you kind of stopped in the middle of the city, and you’re heart rate’s pretty fast right now, even for you.”

“Dude, it is so _messed up_ that you just know my heart rate all the time, y’know?” Barry grinned wider with every word, unable to stop himself, but when he really started to think about it… Cisco could see his heart rate, Cisco could tell where he was, that he’d stopped, because the suit had a locator on it. “Hey, I have a question for you,” he said, interrupting Cisco’s grumpy reply that no, he didn’t know Barry’s heart rate _all_ the time, just when he was in the suit, and it was a perfectly practical—

“What?”

“Is there more than one dot on your map? I mean, am I in two places right now?”

“Um, _what?_ ”

“Come on, seriously. What does the screen say?”

There was a long pause on the other end. “It says you’re standing on the corner of Fifth and Clinton, same place you’ve been for the last minute or so of this, and I have to say, really weird conversation, Barry. And yeah, there’s just the one of you. But you’d let us know if you’d suddenly spawned the ability to split in two, right?”

“‘Course.” Barry shifted himself back up and off the post, feeling new energy rushing through him, like he’d just eaten about twenty of those gross high-calorie power bars. “Hey, I’m headed back now, kay?”

“But I thought you were going to— You know what, scratch that. Maybe you _should_ come back in.”

“Be right there.” Barry took off, running back the way he came. This was perfect; he was the only one of _him_ around, and he could fix this.

  


 

Cisco was waiting with his arms crossed and Dr. Wells at his heels. The fact that he was waiting at all meant Barry had taken a little too long coming back in, running around the city to make sure everything was as it had been.

“Just so you know,” Cisco said, “Caitlin’s coming in.”

Barry nodded. “Good, good.” That’d be easier, if they were all in the same place at once. Speaking of taking care of everything at once… “Uh, I gotta make a call. One sec.” He grabbed his phone; he’d almost forgotten that he had somewhere to be. “Hey, Joe?”

Joe sounded stressed over the phone, but he would cover for him, Barry knew he would. And damn, but it was good to hear his voice. He gave a generic excuse — metahuman related issues, he’d be in to go over the evidence later — and tried to act surprised when Joe dropped the bomb: that it looked like they were dealing with the other Mardon, and he was pissed.

“Just be careful, Joe, and watch out for any weird-looking weather, yeah?”

Joe didn’t seem to know what he meant by that, and Barry had to stop, drag himself back a few steps.

“Uh, I mean, you said the room was wet, right? Mardon was in the same crash as his brother, the accident probably affected him the same way. So I’m thinking weather powers. Anyway, just. Like I said, be careful.” Not that he needed to be just yet; Mardon wouldn’t strike until tomorrow.

Barry hung up and turned to face Dr. Wells and Cisco. "Oh, right." He cleared his throat. "So, there's a second Mardon, now. More weather manipulation, which is always fun."

Dr. Wells furrowed his brow. "You found something at the morgue?"

"Yeah." Barry winced. "Or, well, Joe did. Makes sense, right? They were in the same place when it happened, and they're brothers, so it probably affected them the same way."

“I suppose…”

“Barry, what happened out there?” Cisco interrupted. Barry felt his breathing pause for a moment. Had Cisco noticed something after all? Had one of his sensors noticed that, what, Barry was a day and a half older than he should have been? “You were talking about two points on the map? Two of you?”

Oh, yeah. Now that one, Barry actually had a good excuse for. He smiled, relieved, then remembered he hadn’t been smiling the first time he’d asked this question and dropped it. “Right, that… was weird. Actually, Dr. Wells, I wanted to ask you about that. I was running and I saw, well, I think it was like another me. It was running right next to me but it was gone a couple seconds later.”

“Another you?” Dr. Wells hummed, wheeling himself closer. “Like a mirror image?”

“Kind of,” Barry said, running a hand through his hair. “But not just a reflection in the glass, you know? What do you think it was?”

“Could’ve been an illusion. Not all projections are based on reflective surfaces. Sufficient wind shear and light at the right angle? A speed mirage, would perhaps be the right term.”

Barry swallowed. He’d argued with it before; the image had seemed so _real_ , but of course, now he knew it was. And if he wanted then to forget about it, then he’d have to take a different stance. “Yeah, could be. Had to be, right? Cisco would've noticed if I’d multiplied.”

He’d tell them, Barry thought, to calm the guilty conscience that reared up when the two of them shot him a last look of concern before it faded into acceptance. Eventually, he’d tell them. But time travel was a tricky thing, Back to the Future and Terminator and a thousand other movies had taught him as much, and even if they got some things wrong, there were still some basic lessons to be learned. The first of which was: you couldn’t meddle too much with time, and you couldn’t tell people their futures.

Barry intended to meddle. Maybe that would screw some things up, but what use was it going back if he didn’t try to fix what he could? If he didn’t try to save the Captain, and Joe, and Cisco. Besides, if it was just his mind that jumped back into his slightly-older body, then he wasn’t even in the wrong time, he wasn’t messing up the timestream. It was like he’d just gotten a sneak-peak of one possible future, that wasn’t going to happen now that he knew how to do it right.

But he couldn’t tell his friends anything, not if he wanted to play it safe. Not until after he’d made the changes that were needed to set things on the right track. They couldn’t know their future until he was sure it wouldn’t be their future at all.

While Barry was mulling over the informed consent of time travel, Cisco and Dr. Wells had taken a moment to backtrack to the problem of another souped-up Mardon brother in town. Cisco was mentioning his wand-thing, the one that soaked up the energy Mardon needed to control the weather. That could be useful, though Barry wasn’t sure it’d be ready in time. He’d need to act quickly, before Mardon had the chance to do any kind of damage...

Caitlin chose that moment of introspection to enter the room. (Oh, yeah, he’d _definitely_ taken too long to get here, if he’d only beaten Caitlin by a few minutes.) She didn’t ask why she’d been dragged out of her apartment less than an hour shy of midnight, so she must have been filled in over the phone, at least the part of it they’d known when they called her. Barry listened as Dr. Wells told her about the phenomena that they believed explained Barry’s odd behavior, filling in a blank or two with a comment of ‘weird, right?’ and ‘yeah, well, it was freaky when it happened, but...’

“Well, I’d like to check you out, anyway, just to be sure,” Caitlin said casually, like that hadn’t been their plan all along. “Cisco said your vitals were off, too, and you were going considerably faster than usual.”

“I wanted to get there fast,” Barry defended.

“What, you had to speed to the _morgue_?” Cisco raised an eyebrow. “No one speeds on their way to the morgue, dude. Not even dead people. You gotta take your time like normal folks.”

Barry couldn’t quite manage a frown, not when he was enjoying listening to his friend tease him so damn much. “There was _crime_ going on, Cisco. Crime. People speed toward crime.”

“Actually, most people speed _away_ from crime,” Cisco reminded him. He was reaching into a nearby drawer and pulling out a sucker, though, which meant he was feeling calmer, at least. “But I guess everyone has quirks.”

“True.” Barry waited until Cisco had the sucker just unwrapped, then darted over and snatched it out of his hands, zipping back to his original position before Cisco noticed the moment. He grinned triumphantly and stuck the sucker in his own mouth just as Cisco noticed he was holding nothing but empty air.

Cisco pointed an accusing finger in his direction, the one the had just barely missed going into his mouth in place of the missing treat. “See? Crime.”

Barry laughed. “I know, I’m terrible. I’m sorry. You want it back?” He made a point of pulling the sucker out of his mouth with a sharp smack and offering it out, but Cisco just made a face and held his hands up in defense.

“Ew, no thanks. You can just owe me the twenty cents.”

Twenty cents was probably a gross overestimate, given the bulk size of the bag in the drawer from which Cisco pulled out a second piece of candy, but Barry figured he’d let it slide.

“If you’re done?” Caitlin said, arms crossed and head tilted to the side expectantly. Reaching into the drawer for the third time, Cisco tossed her another sucker, which she caught with a small smile. “Alright, come on, Barry. Time for a check-up, I’m serious.”

“Okay, okay.” He turned, ready to let himself be led out of the room, but then faltered.

‘ _No wound_ ,’ Caitlin had said over the phone, the words brittle and uncertain. ‘ _No head trauma_.’ That could have meant anything, could even have meant there was a wound that she just didn’t see in the first minute or two. Barry had been assuming that it, like everything else that had seemed to go horribly wrong that day, could somehow be traced back to Mardon (if he could control the wind, why couldn’t he, say, steal the breath from someone’s lungs), but what if that wasn’t it? There were a hundred thousand things that could go wrong inside a person’s own body.

“But, uh.” Barry stopped near the door, and Caitlin turned to look back at him. “Maybe… Maybe we should _all_ get check-ups?”

The silence felt oppressive. Shit, he hadn’t prepared for this, not at all. Say something, Barry. Say anything.

“I mean, who actually goes to the doctor as often as they’re supposed to, right?” Anything that made _sense_ , damn. He was _so_ not smooth.

Dr. Wells had taken an interest in the conversation once more. “Barry, are you sure you’re alright?”

“Sure,” Barry said quickly, trying his best to look nonchalant while also insistent enough to get his way. “I was just thinking, you know, for the sake of general health, and there’s gotta be a lot of chemicals and… dust... floating around in here?” He floundered, trying to grab onto any semi-reasonable explanation for his request. “And, Cisco has a cough!”

“What? No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” Barry said, shooting him a look and _totally_ abusing the follow-along-now-ask-later eyebrow-raise.

“I…” Cisco paused. “Might have had a cough last week?”

Caitlin was now looking back and forth between the two of them, as if trying to figure out what kind of joke they were playing on her.

In the continued silence, Cisco raised his hand to his mouth and coughed, once.

“Well,” Caitlin said slowly, expression still caught somewhere between bafflement and suspicion, “I guess it couldn’t hurt to do a couple more exams.”

“Great!” Barry grinned, already moving toward the doorway, where he hovered until all three of them had passed through ahead of him. He’d sweep them right along in a rush of energy. It didn’t matter if they stopped to wonder afterward, what mattered was getting it done in the first place. And Cisco was going first.

  


 

As it happened, Cisco did not go first. Dr. Wells begged off early, insisting that he wanted to go have a look at the device Cisco had mentioned. He got a quick check of temperature and breath sounds before waving off the blood pressure cuff, reminding them that he was perfectly healthy and had other things to take care of. Barry barely bothered putting up a token resistance; after all, it wasn’t Wells he was worried about.

It wasn’t Caitlin, either, who naturally couldn’t give herself much of a check-up, though she clipped on a monitor or two to check her heart rate and oxygen levels and swore to check for any odd lumps or moles the next time she took a shower, in the interest of general awareness. At this point, she insisted that Barry lay down on the table, and he found it difficult to argue since it had, after all, been him who had prompted this round of medical overviews in the first place. When everything came up normal, or normal enough for his case, it was finally Cisco’s turn.

So instead of first, Cisco was last, but that just meant Barry was able to make sure the check-up was thorough. He even managed to sweet-talk his way into getting Caitlin to give Cisco an EKG, since the leads had already been taken out for his own benefit. To Barry’s matching relief and exasperation, everything was extremely regular.

It must have been Mardon after all, then, though Barry wasn’t sure why the man would have bothered going after Cisco when he was busy with Joe and his actual revenge plot. Maybe he’d come down to the lab to try to find that wand, take it out of the picture? He had seemed pretty freaked out when he’d realized it could stop his powers cold. Maybe Cisco had just been a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing. Barry shuddered; it seemed wrong that something like that could be attributed to an accident.

Caitlin pulled the stethoscope away from her ears, draping it back around her neck. “All set. Cut back on the junk food and I’ll see you in a year.”

Cisco rolled his eyes. “You’ll see me _tomorrow_ with a slushie in hand, and maybe, if you’re lucky, I’ll bring you one too. Can I put my shirt back on, now?”

“Please do. Barry, I know we went over all of this already, but are you sure you aren’t feeling anything at all… unusual? Even if you think it’s just in your head?”

“I’d tell you, Caitlin.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Like you told us about the dizzy spells?”

Barry winced. “I learned my lesson from that, okay? Cross my heart. I’m fine. I just… I’ve only been doing the speed thing for a few months, you know? I guess there’s still a couple things that can surprise me.”

After a few more sideways looks and lingering a bit over gathering up her things, Caitlin finally left, clearly missing her bed in these wee hours of the morning. Barry hovered around the exam table, thinking to himself. There were things you couldn’t test for in one night, he knew, things that were practically invisible until they caused a problem, but what was it worth worrying about something he couldn’t stop—

A throat cleared behind him, and Barry jerked hard enough to bang his knee against the table edge. Jeez, it wasn’t even like he hadn’t realized he wasn’t alone in the lab, he was just feeling so jumpy, it was ridiculous. “Ow.”

“Sorry.” Cisco shrugged.

“It’s okay. I heal fast. What’s up?”

Cisco shrugged again, edging a little closer and then stopping, as if he’d reached some invisible fence. “Just thought you’d want to know, you were wearing your suit the whole time we talked, earlier. You know, about that speed mirage you saw?”

Barry frowned, unsure why Cisco would be bringing this up. “Yeah. So?”

Nodding, Cisco shuffled another half-inch forward. It was such a small movement that Barry felt inexplicably irritated for a moment, wanted to reach out and drag Cisco into the bubble of space he seemed to be avoiding. “Barry, you know how a polygraph machine works?”

Of course he did; he was CSI, but he worked with the police, after all. Lie detectors were glorified bodily monitors, they worked because the body had a physiological response to lying: heart rate increased, respiration went up, blood pressure could be affected, even sweating could be measured and matched against a baseline to—

Oh. Oh, no.

‘ _Dude, it is so messed up that you just know my heart rate all the time, y’know?_ ’

Oh, no, no, _no_.

“I mean, I knew the whole “chemicals in the air” thing was crap — and I think I deserve some major credit for playing along on _that_ one, by the way — but I don’t even know why you would lie to Dr. Wells about what you saw.” The horror must have shown on Barry’s face, because Cisco sighed and continued. “So, you wanna tell me what was really going on?”

Barry took a deep breath. Oh, this was not going to go well. “I, um. Really don’t. I mean, I do!” he added hastily, when Cisco started to look actively hurt by the dismissal. “But, I can’t. Not right now. I have to do something first, but I swear I’ll tell you the truth after that, I just— Not tonight.” Barry took another breath, trying to slow the stream of words. “Is that… okay?”

Cisco released the lip he’d been chewing on and inhaled, shaking his head just a little. “Yeah, it’s okay,” he said, and Barry let out a long sigh of relief. “Just… don’t get smushed or skewered in the meantime, and as soon as you’re done with whatever-it-is, you come right back here to let me know what’s up, got it?”

“Totally,” Barry assured him, with a grin creeping onto his face. “Absolutely. You got it.”

“You can talk to me about stuff, you know,” Cisco continued, almost casually. “I know Caitlin’s got the medical background and I’m just the gear guy, but I can still listen.”

“I know, man. Thanks.” Barry reached out and clapped Cisco on the shoulder, the first time he’d touched him yet tonight, the first time since he’d heard he was dead, and he was suddenly all but overwhelmed by the desire to draw him closer and into a hug. Cisco wouldn’t mind, he was a touchy sorta guy, but Barry would probably hold on a little too tight, and then Cisco would think he was hiding even more, and he’d offer to talk again, and they were in a good place right now. Barry didn’t want to worry him (again). “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, letting his hand slip away.

Cisco pointed at him sternly. “Yes, you will.”

Barry gave him a thumbs up over his shoulder as he went in search of his coat. He would see them tomorrow, and he’d tell them what he hadn’t been able to tonight. He just had to take care of a couple things first.


	2. Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, so what did we think of 1x16? I ended up drawing a little more from that episode than I thought, mostly timeline stuff (and Dr. Well's reaction, which was not what I expected), but I definitely had a different plan than the writers, so I'm sticking with that.
> 
> You may have noticed a couple of new tags; it's not because I made major story changes, I just forgot them when I first posted (oops). I've also changed the number of chapters to a question mark, because as usual, this story kind of got away from me (I'm aiming for five parts, now).
> 
> Also, this is the chapter where the major character injury comes into play. I wasn't sure whether the specifics of it warranted a separate warning or not, so if you want to know more about it before you read, check the notes at the end of the chapter.

Barry yawned for the fifth time since arriving at the station with Joe. He probably should have gotten more sleep last night, but instead he’d been busy going over the evidence from the morgue (unimportant, since he already knew what had happened there) and making plans for how to deal with Mardon (highly important, given the number of things that could go wrong if he didn’t get it right the first time). Captain Singh’s lecture went mostly over his head, but that was okay. He’d heard it before, and it was meant for Joe, anyway.

He should have remembered that Iris walked in after that, but it took him by surprise anyway and he had to catch his breath. This Iris, he reminded himself, hadn’t kissed him. This Iris hadn’t told him about how she felt, but he knew about it anyway. It was easy to fake a smile for her at Joe’s request, because it wasn’t really fake. It wasn’t the time to figure things out between them right now, but later, wow, later was going to be awesome.

“Me and Barry were actually gonna go grab lunch.”

“We were? Right, yeah, yeah.” Barry nodded, pushing off the wall and turning to lead Joe out. He tried his best to ignore Iris walking over to Eddie, to not see it out of the corner of his eye. It would all be okay later, he reminded himself.

He let Joe pick the place for breakfast, somewhere they hadn’t been in a while, but didn’t order more than a side he could eat quickly. It wasn’t like a full meal would make much more of a dent in his caloric needs, and he’d need his hands free for what was coming.

He finished his food a little quicker than a normal human should and tossed the container out on the way past the garbage cans. “Hey, Joe?”

Joe turned expectantly, keys already in hand.

“I’m gonna head back a different way, gotta take care of something first.”

Joe looked surprised at that. For all that he was taking the threat to his person very calmly, he clearly knew that it was unusual for Barry not to be worried and hyper-protective. Technically, Joe wasn’t even supposed to be alone, right now. Not that he would care about that part. “Everything okay with you, Barry? You know, I’m here if you need to talk.”

That was the second time Barry had heard that offer, now. He was acting weird, he knew he was. But this was important. “Yeah, it’s fine. Just something I forgot, you know, with everything going on right now.”

“Okay, well.” Joe shuffled his keys around, leaning forward to unlock the car. “See you soon, then?”

“Definitely. And, Joe? When I said to watch out for weird weather patterns, uh, I meant it. If you see lightning or it, like, starts raining…” He was taking a risk with this, a calculated one but it could easily backfire if he didn’t get to Mardon in time. He hoped it was worth it, hoped he wasn’t dooming Joe by not being beside him in the car.

He made sure Joe promised to be careful before taking off. Barry had his suit handy for just this purpose, so he was changed and trailing after Joe’s car in short spurts of speed before he could lose track of him, on the lookout for any signs of foul play.

It was a bright, sunny day in the city, no unusual spots of localized weather yet. As Barry darted around corners and behind walls, trying to remain as inconspicuous as it was possible for a red blur to be, a nasty thought started to seep into his head. What if he had already managed to change something, and he just didn’t know it? What if Mardon wasn’t going to attack the same way he had last time, and Barry was unprepared, going in blind?

Just as he really began to feel panic creeping in (his one advantage, and he couldn’t even be sure of that), a section of sky started to darken.

 _There_.

Rain fell over Joe’s car, and this was it, it had to be, so where was Mardon? Barry looked around frantically even as he jogged to keep up with Joe’s car, trailing far enough behind that he hoped he wasn’t noticed. Mardon didn’t have that long a range, he had to be _here_ , didn’t he? So where…

There, a car. Barry squinted through the darkened windshields; that had to be him. He took a breath and braced himself. He didn’t have the wand this time, didn’t have any sort of specialized weapon that could take away Mardon’s power, so it would have to be a surprise attack, while Mardon was focused on Joe. Take him down before he could think to redirect.

Up ahead, Joe seemed to have heeded his warning about the weather, and stopped the car. Barry had to act now.

He took another deep breath and darted forward, coming up behind and along the passenger side of the car. Mardon was focused forward, clenching his fist to call up a reaction from the clouds. With a burst of speed, Barry ripped open the door of the car and shot forward, not bothering to slow down when he hit Mardon but just carrying straight through out the other side of the car in a way that probably wasn’t kind to Mardon’s left shoulder, but Barry didn’t care.

They landed hard on the pavement, and when Mardon groaned beneath him, Barry punched him hard on the temple, sending his head back against the road once again. He lay still after that, out cold, and Barry watched him for an extra second to be sure, body shaking from all the excess adrenaline he hadn’t needed after all.

“Hey,” Joe called, and Barry looked over his shoulder to see Joe opening the door of his car and leaning out to look back at them. Barry glanced upward; the clouds sparked once or twice, then receded gently, dispersing back into the sky. He let out all the air built up in his lungs in one long rush.

“I got him.” Barry shook his head, disbelievingly. Was it really that simple? “Joe, I got him.”

Joe jogged forward, leaned down and put two fingers to Mardon’s neck, checking for a pulse. Barry felt immediately guilty; he’d barrelled the man through the door of a car and hit him in the face. Of course they should check him out. Just because Mardon was a killer didn’t mean Barry wanted to be one too. Luckily, Joe just nodded and pulled his hand back.

“You should take him back now, before he wakes up. I’ll call it in, say The Flash got to him and then vanished. Barry…” Joe paused, searching Barry’s face, faltering for the first time since he’d stopped the car. “How did you…?”

“I was just running past,” Barry said. “Saw the rain over your car, figured it had to be Mardon. Pretty good timing, right?”

“Yeah. Pretty damn good.”

Barry hauled Mardon up, going to throw him over his shoulder as he got to his feet and stumbling a little as the weight fell on his body. He felt energized and drained all at once.

“Whoa.” Joe reached out to steady him. “You good?”

“Definitely,” Barry assured him. Definitely. Everything was good, now. He just needed a moment to stabilize himself and off he went, to deposit Mardon in the Pipeline where he belonged.

 

 

 

“Exactly how hard did you hit him?” Caitlin muttered, pulling thread through a gash at the back of Mardon’s scalp. Mardon didn’t so much as twitch, kept unconscious and under control by a sedative. It seemed counter-intuitive to give him medical attention, but, well, they couldn’t really _not_.

Barry fiddled nervously with a thin pair of scissors on a tray. “I didn’t hit him so much as the ground hit him, technically.”

Caitlin paused in her work, glancing significantly at the bruise on Mardon’s temple and back to Barry.

“Okay, so I did, once, but he was stirring up a lightning storm right over our heads, so I think I was justified.”

The needle went in and out of Mardon’s skin once again, trailing thread smoothly just to the side of the wound. “You seem pretty worked up about it, is all I’m saying.” Caitlin pulled the thread through itself, made a knot, and cut off the trailing end, _snap_.

Had they been monitoring his heart rate again? Barry scrunched his nose up, slightly annoyed, but they hadn’t even known he’d planned on using the suit, so it couldn’t have been that. “He had to be stopped,” Barry insisted. “He was dangerous.”

Caitlin had moved on to the bandaging, eyes focused on the gauze but somehow still appearing stern in a way only she could manage. “And you did stop him. Before he had a chance to do much of anything.”

“He _killed_ …” Barry stopped himself, swallowing hard. “The coroner. He killed the coroner. For no reason, he didn’t even need to. He just wanted information, and he didn’t care what happened to the guy after that.”

“I know.” Caitlin’s voice softened. “Sorry, I know. I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve to get locked away in here, I’m just saying… You seem off, Barry. Angry. You can’t let these guys get to you like that; it won’t be healthy in the long run.”

“He was trying to kill Joe, Caitlin,” Barry pleaded.

She sighed, securing the bandage with another strip of tape before glancing over at the monitors. “Okay, let’s get him down the the Pipeline. He’s going to wake up, soon.”

Cisco gave them a hand with the move, Dr. Wells unable to help but trailing along behind with a thoughtful expression on his face that made Barry wonder if he was going to get a second lecture on anger management.

“How did you know he was going to be there?” Cisco asked as they shut the door on Mardon. Barry felt another surge of relief at seeing the man sealed off and put away for good. He was already starting to twitch awake; he could figure out what had happened on his own.

“Just a hunch.” Barry leaned against the wall, watching the capsule holding Mardon fall back into the larger chamber. “Figured he’d be following Joe around. Which, he was. So that worked out pretty well; he didn’t even see me coming.”

“That was very good thinking, Barry,” Dr. Wells said, with just enough of a question on the end that Barry would have found it in himself to be a little hurt if it weren’t for the fact that, well, he was right. It hadn’t just been ‘good thinking’ that had led him to Mardon.

“Right, well. There might’ve been a little more to it than that.”

Dr. Wells continued to regard him steadily, expectantly.

“We should probably go back upstairs.”

To have this conversation, Barry would rather be surrounded by familiar lab equipment than criminals.

Cisco raised an eyebrow at him as he passed by, and Barry nodded. Yes, he was going to explain about last night. Now that Mardon was put away, the danger had passed, and he could tell them all what had happened (what hadn’t happened, more like) without worrying he was going to screw something up.

Being a tad quicker than his friends, Barry went ahead and changed back into his regular clothes, checking the time on his phone as he did so. He had a lunch date with Linda, one he’d missed the first time around in the aftermath of Joe’s car getting hit by lightning, but this time he was sure he could make it.

“Guess we’re not going to need my expertise on this one after all,” Cisco said as he entered the room, gesturing over to the device shaped like a scepter that lay on a desk when Barry made a questioning noise.

Barry shrugged. “Sure, but we’ve already found two metahumans where it could’ve been useful. You never know, maybe we’ll need it again.”

“I’m impressed you didn’t need it this time at all,” Dr. Wells said, focusing the conversation back around.

“Right, well. Element of surprise.” But to have that, he would have had to know that Mardon would be there, of course. “Remember I was asking about that speed mirage, last night?”

Dr. Wells nodded slowly.

“Well, it wasn’t a mirage, exactly. It was me. Or, another me.”

Was it Barry’s imagination that Dr. Wells went just a little pale at the announcement? Caitlin and Cisco didn’t seem to have the same reaction; they looked just as confused as before.

“Another you?” Caitlin said. “Barry, I thought we—”

“No, trust me, I…” How was he supposed to start explaining this? “Okay, this isn’t the first time I’ve lived through today.”

Cisco’s eyebrows raised, finally, and Barry imagined his mind spinning off in the same directions his own had taken when he’d first realized where (when) he was. Dr. Wells looked… downright concerned.

“It was yester— Or, it was tomorrow morning, actually, when Mardon had this gigantic—”

“Stop.” Dr. Wells spoke for the first time since Barry had begun to explain. “Don’t tell us what was happening. Are you saying that you believe you traveled back in time?”

“No,” Caitlin scoffed. She smiled hesitantly, shooting looks between Dr. Wells and Barry. “No, of course he’s not saying that.”

“Yeah, I am saying that.”

“Oh my God,” Cisco breathed, but he was smiling, too, much wider than Caitlin, so it had to be a good ‘oh my God.’ “That’s _awesome_.”

“I mean, not very far back. Just, about a day and a half. I don’t know how it happened. I was running pretty fast, but I don’t know if I was at my top speed yet, because I had to keep turning back and forth. I was trying to make a wall—”

“Barry, you _cannot tell us anything_ ,” Dr. Wells insisted, moving himself closer to look Barry in the eyes. “If what you believe happened has actually happened, then it is imperative that you do not give us any hints about what kind of future we could have. The timestream is a very fragile construct.”

Barry shook his head. “But I stopped it. I stopped everything; that’s not our future anymore.”

“You stopped it?” Cisco asked, then nodded slowly. “Mardon,” he guessed.

“Yeah. So, we’re good, now.”

“We are not good.” Dr. Wells looked upset now, actively distressed in a way Barry wasn’t sure how to deal with. “If you’ve changed things, Barry, then you meddled in ways no one was ever meant to meddle. If you’d come to me with this last night…” He shook his head. “I would have told you to do exactly what you’d done the first time, down to the last syllable you spoke. You have no idea what kind of damage you might have done.”

Feeling nausea rise up in his stomach, Barry took a step back. “With respect, Dr. Wells? If you knew what happened the first time, you wouldn’t be telling me this. You’d understand why it had to be stopped.”

“No. Time has ways of fixing itself, of reinventing the inevitable. Whatever disaster you think you’ve averted, whatever tragedy you altered, something else will arise in its place. There are things you can’t change, Barry. Things that you shouldn’t.”

Dr. Wells looked away, waiting a moment before turning to leave the room, apparently done talking. The whir of his chair was too loud, echoing off the walls.

Barry waited until he was gone before letting himself fall back to lean against the desk. He hadn’t thought… Well, he hadn’t thought Dr. Wells would react like that, not in a million years. The man was all for restraint, but he was also for exploring Barry’s speed and what it could do. This should be exciting, this should be something new. And it hadn’t come a minute too soon.

“I did the right thing,” he said softly, unsure whether it was for his own benefit or for his friends.

Cisco cleared his throat. “It’s done, anyway. And we should probably talk about this whole going-back-in-time thing because dude, _seriously_. You don’t have any idea how it happened?”

Barry shook his head.

“Well, we can work on that.” Cisco nodded to himself, moving around the room with confidence now that he had a purpose. “I can pull up the data last night, start going through a few things. We can see how fast you were going, too, but I don’t think this is gonna be a 88-miles-per-hour kind of thing. I have to cancel some plans.”

“What?” Barry looked up at the subject change. “No, you don’t have to do that.”

“Uh, yeah, I do.” Cisco grinned. “Trust me when I say this is _way_ better than what I’m getting out of.” Pulling out his phone, Cisco turned to leave the room. His mouth was moving just slightly as he looked down at the screen, which Barry knew meant he was running numbers through his head.

At least someone was excited about this. Barry had been, too, up until a few minutes ago.

A hand on his shoulder made him jerk up suddenly. He hadn’t even noticed Caitlin getting closer. “Hey.”

He smiled. “Hey.”

“So, these changes that you made,” she said, ducking her head a little further in. “You definitely think it was the right way to do it?”

“Cait— _Yeah_.” He took a deep breath, let it hiss out between his teeth. “I told you, if you guys knew what had happened, well. It had to be different.” He couldn’t have done that. Even if he had managed to make the sort of wall that could block Mardon’s wave, even if he’d taken down Mardon and gotten to Joe in time, that still left Captain Singh in the hospital looking like he’d never walk again. That still left Cisco dead on the floor.

Barry glanced up without meaning to, toward the door Cisco had just gone through. If Dr. Wells had known that the old future would have ended in Cisco’s death, he wouldn’t have told Barry to go through with it. Never.

“I had to change it.”

“Okay.”

He looked back at her quickly. She wasn’t smiling sympathetically or searching him for a lie. She looked steady. “Okay?”

“Okay. I trust you.” Now, she smiled, nudging his shoulder with the hand that still rested there. “What, you’re surprised?”

“No, I’m just… Thanks.” Barry scrubbed a hand over the side of his face. This was a pretty big leap, after he’d freaked out on Mardon like that. “Seriously.”

“Anytime.” Her hand slipped off his shoulder. “So, Cisco’s gonna be busy going over the data for a while longer, and honestly, I’m kind of interested in it myself. We’ll need you later, but, didn’t you mention having some place to be?”

“Damn, you’re right.” He pulled out his phone to check the time. Not too bad, but he was probably going to end up late. “Okay, I’m going. I’ll check in after lunch.”

“See you then.”

 

 

 

Linda was waiting for him when he reached the building. She was waiting in a non-guilt-inducing, getting-stuff-done-while-the-guy-I-have-plans-with-takes-his-time-getting-here sort of way, but he still felt bad about it. Maybe that was because he was going to break up with her.

He’d have to; he’d realized that quickly enough. If something was going to happen between him and Iris, he should really make sure it could happen in a genuine way. Last time, everything had been so panicked and sudden that it hadn’t even occurred to him he was technically cheating — they both were. But now, he could do the right thing.

Linda was surprisingly cool about it. She must’ve had a good eye for the ‘we need to talk’ face, because she almost seemed to expect it.

“I know how it is, when you’ve got your eye on someone else.” She smiled, only a little disappointed, and glanced over her shoulder at where Iris was talking to that guy, that Mason Bridge who thought there was something going on with Dr. Wells. Barry frowned; Wells had enough rumors going on about his work already.

But first, he was finishing this conversation. “Yeah, uh. I’m sorry.”

She waved the apology off. “You don’t need to be. That’s just how it works, sometimes. Anyway, I’m glad you talked to me instead of just going off and doing something about it, first.”

Barry smiled a little shakily. Right, well. Not this time, anyway. This wasn’t exactly the top of his ‘important things to fix’ list, but he was still glad he had the chance.

“So, now you’ve talked to me, go talk to her. And keep my number,” Linda added, twisting her chair back around to her desk. “I may still need a karaoke partner in the future.”

Pushing himself to his feet, Barry didn’t even have it in him to deny that possibility, both because Linda had been beyond understanding and because he was walking toward Iris, now. Iris, who was taking a paper from Mason and leaning back in her chair and looking absolutely beautiful. And when she saw him coming, she smiled.

For the first time since he’d found himself in that square with the people shouting and Cisco questioning in his ear, Barry seriously wondered whether this could be real.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” he asked, interrupting whatever Mason had been saying and ignoring the annoyed look on the man’s face.

“Uh, sure.” Iris handed the picture back and stood, moving with Barry off to a side of the room where it was a little less crowded and noisy. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Barry said quickly. “Nothing much, what’s going on with you?”

She laughed lightly. “Same old, same old, I guess. Working on something interesting, finally, though I think Mason wants to go a whole different way. Did you have something you needed to tell me?”

“Right.” Barry shifted, clearing his throat. How did he start? What was he supposed to say? He shouldn’t be this worried; he already knew she cared about him. “Well, I was just thinking… You remember last Christmas, when—”

The tri-tone ring of a cell phone interrupted him, coming out of the pocket of Iris’ jacket. “Sorry,” she said, shifting it out a little to check the screen. “Shoot, it’s Dad, I should talk to him. Hang on one second?”

Well, he wasn’t just going to leave now, was he? He nodded, gesturing for her to take the call while he bounced lightly on the balls of his feet and tried to think of what he was going to say. Iris turned from him slightly to answer the phone, but didn’t move away. Her hair fell in a curtain over the side of her face as she focused on the caller. Barry had to fight the urge to reach out, run his fingers through the waves of black, tuck a lock behind her ear—

“What?” Her voice, suddenly louder and higher than he’d expected, broke him from his reverie. She was clutching the phone so hard her hand was turning white, Barry realized. The other hand had come up, shaking, to hover near her mouth. “No, I just— How bad?”

“Iris,” Barry whispered, dread shooting through his body and turning his veins to ice. “Iris, what is it?” He put a hand on her arm, trying to draw her back to him, but she didn’t seem to notice, only drawing further into herself. Barry was grabbing at empty air. He couldn’t breathe.

“I’ll be right there.” Someone spoke over the phone, sharp enough that Barry could just hear the edge of a man’s voice. “No, I. Barry’s here. He’ll drive me.”

“Is it Joe?” Barry asked urgently, amazed he could get the words to come out through a throat that felt too tight, a chest that seemed to press in on him. He hadn’t been watching, had assumed that because Mardon was put away, the danger had passed. He hadn’t even thought to keep looking.

‘ _Whatever disaster you think you’ve averted, whatever tragedy you altered, something else will arise in its place._ ’

No, no, Dr. Wells was wrong, he had to be. Because if he wasn’t, then this was all Barry’s fault. He was the reason Iris was standing there, shaking and crying.

“Iris, what happened? Is it Joe?”

She seemed to remember he was there, finally, looking up at him with eyes that were already red with tears. “It’s Eddie.”

 

 

 

This was what people meant when they said ‘déjà vu,’ Barry thought, staring down at the tile floor and counting the same number of black specks he remembered from the last time he’d been there, two days ago or several hours from now, depending on how you were counting.

It wasn’t what he’d felt last night, standing on the street corner and watching the sign twirling, the taxi fly by, the lights change. That wasn’t something familiar, it was something he’d already done, _exactly_. Déjà vu was similar, but different. A step to the side of what you remembered.

It was sitting in the same chair outside the same hospital room and waiting for a different man to wake up.

The cup of coffee in his hands had long since gone cold. He hadn’t even tried to drink it; they hadn’t been here long or late enough for him to need the caffeine. It just felt like something you were supposed to have when you were waiting in a hospital. He’d had coffee last time. Now, he didn’t think he could choke it down if his life depended on it. Every time he glanced at the door to the room, he felt a wave of nausea so strong he was surprised his stomach wasn’t jumping straight out of his body.

Finally, a doctor came out. Iris and Joe jumped up immediately, but Barry hung back for a minute, trying to gather enough breath to walk over and stand up straight while he heard everything that shouldn’t have happened. It was a stupid accident, a driver skidding out of control on the highway that had smashed into Eddie’s car, and it hadn’t happened last time. It wasn’t until Iris put a hand over her mouth and leaned into Joe, who wrapped a strong arm around her shoulders, that Barry pushed himself forward.

“—take him back into surgery soon,” the doctor was saying, and Barry winced. More surgery? Hadn’t they done enough of that, yet?

“Can I see him?” Iris asked, her voice steadier than it seemed like it should be from the tear streaks on her cheeks.

“I’m sorry, only family is allowed in right now.” The doctor softened her gaze when she delivered the blow, either genuinely sorry or practiced enough at faking it.

“His mother’s on her way. She had trouble finding a flight, she’s still a few hours out.” Joe was explaining to the doctor, but Barry’s eyes were on Iris, the way she took a breath and straightened her shoulders before interrupting her father.

“I’m his fiance,” she said, smooth as anything.

She was lying; Barry knew she was lying. She would have told him, would have shown him a ring and beamed and made him promise to leave an entire month open in his schedule while they nailed down an exact date. Her hand didn’t have any extra jewelry on it, but it was flicking against her leg the way it did when she was fibbing.

“I know it’s not legal and official just yet, but it still makes me family.” She stared steadily at the doctor, not noticing the way Joe’s arm had slipped off her shoulder. Joe knew she was lying, too, Barry was sure, but neither of them made any move to correct her.

The doctor hesitated, then nodded, waving her through the door. “Of course.”

Not missing a beat, Iris took the invitation and strode into the room, betraying her weariness only by the way she fell into the chair by Eddie’s bed, grabbing his hand as soon as it was within reach. Barry watched from the hallway. Eddie looked torn up, more than a car accident should allow, but Barry supposed highway crashes were always the worst, and that accounted for the bruising all over his arms, the bandage across his cheekbone. Barry looked up and down his body, trying to catalogue damage under the blankets, and drew in a sharp breath when he got to the feet.

He thought he was wrong, at first, that the blankets were just bunched up wrong or that Eddie hadn’t been laid down straight, but no, there it was. A left leg pointed perfectly straight toward the end of the bed, and a right leg that ended a foot or so sooner.

How had he missed the doctor saying _that_? Because he’d been off in his own world, Barry imagined, too busy trying to understand what had happened to actually bother listening to what had happened.

“He’s tough,” Joe said, from beside him, and Barry nodded vaguely, unsure what he could say in reply. But Joe continued. “So is she.”

Barry tore his eyes away from Eddie’s missing foot and back to Iris, who had Eddie’s hand clutched to her chin and was whispering something Barry couldn’t hear, because the doctor had shut the door behind her when she’d gone back in. Barry swallowed. She looked scared, terrified, but sure. Like a flood, an earthquake, and an army couldn’t tear her from where she sat. And Barry knew he had lost her.

Even if he could be the kind of guy who would swoop in on someone while their boyfriend lay unconscious and injured in the hospital, Iris would never be the kind of girl who would let him do it. _They got together over_ your _hospital bed_ , Barry thought bitterly. _Yes, and how did that make you feel?_ another part of him piped up. They hadn’t even been together, then. He had no right to be making a move, right now, and it wouldn’t be any kind of welcome.

He could see the next few months laid out before him: it would take Eddie a long time to recover, even once he was awake and healing there would be physical therapy and follow-up appointments, and Iris would be around to help him out at home. She would focus in on him with laser precision because that’s just what Iris did, when she was passionate about something. She would love him; she _did_ love him. And maybe she loved Barry, too, but not enough to leave Eddie, not now. Those feelings would fade.

Eventually, maybe they really would be engaged.

This was, of course, all dependent on Eddie waking up at all, but Barry couldn’t stomach even thinking of the alternative as a possibility. It was his fault Eddie was here at all, his fault the universe had decided to take someone else to replace the man he’d saved from the same hospital bed. He would just have to live with the consequences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The major injury in this chapter involves Eddie getting into a car accident. He loses his right foot as a result of the crash.


	3. Part III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey-o, I'm back. Anyone around still pumped for S1 AUs???
> 
> Anyway, I think there will be two more chapters after this, which I'll try to finish in a reasonable time. Reminder that while I've adapted this story to tie in a little better with what actually happened in 1x16, it's also very much an AU from when we had only 1x15 and the upcoming promo to go on.

It was the kind of day that just had to end at a bar. Luckily, Barry had some very intuitive friends who refused to let him mope alone, so Cisco ended up sitting at the table next to him, holding onto a glass of beer and kicking his feet intermittently against the table legs.

“You know, it’s not like I can actually get blackout drunk,” Barry reminded him. He frowned down at his own glass. “Or drunk at all, really.”

“Hey, I never said I was here to monitor your alcohol intake. Down a whole bottle of tequila for all I care, just do it without blaming yourself for everything.”

Barry scowled. “Not everything. Just the things that are my fault. Eddie was fine last time; I’m the one who changed things.”

Cisco raised an eyebrow. “You hit him with a car?”

“No, I just put him in its way.”

“Hmm.” Cisco took a short drink. He’d been nursing that one beer for the last hour or so (in which they’d been mostly silent), trying to keep pace with Barry’s metabolism. “Okay, this pity party’s getting old, fast. You're gonna hold yourself responsible for every bad thing that happens from this point on?

“Nope,” he continued, waving Barry off before he could even start to answer. “I’ll give you this one for now, but we’ve gotta put a time limit on this thing. When did you go back in time, exactly?”

Barry frowned. “Tomorrow morning?”

“What time?”

“Um.” Barry had to think about that one. He hadn’t exactly kept track, with everything that had been happening. “I dunno, maybe eleven?”

“Okay, so, 11 AM tomorrow.” Cisco jabbed his finger down at the bar to punctuate the time. “After that, you can’t hold yourself responsible for anything bad that happens.”

“And if I agree to that, you’re going to let me keep feeling bad about Eddie?” Barry asked, raising an eyebrow.

Cisco shrugged. “I’ll let him or Iris beat that one out of you. I’m sure they’ll get around to it soon enough. In the meantime, I’m happy to sit here and listen to you whine about it all night, if you want. I mean, not _happy_ , but...”

Barry couldn’t help it. It must have been something in Cisco’s casual tone, like this was no bigger a deal than two friends deciding to even out a $10 debt with the purchase of coffee and a scone. “I reserve the right to feel like shit tomorrow. Any normal person would have a hangover from hell.”

“Who am I to argue with the physiological mysteries of the body that wants to convince itself it has a headache?” Cisco agreed easily. “It’s a deal.”

He held out a hand, clearly unwilling to let it go until they’d made it official, and Barry met him with an only half-reluctant shake.

“There.” Cisco sighed, raising his beer for another miniscule sip. “Cheer up, Barry. Only…” He checked his watch. “Thirteen hours to go before you’re back to the same old routine of free will and terrifying uncertainty as the rest of us.”

“Thirteen hours,” Barry repeated.

“Sleep in late,” Cisco suggested.

“Hi,” a newcomer said.

Barry turned in surprise, fingers halting their anxious tapping, to see a woman standing just beside him. She was very pretty, though the makeup was a bit overzealous and the hair color just didn’t seem to fit. She smiled nervously as she continued.

“I don’t normally do this, but I was watching you, and… Can I buy you a drink?”

“Uh, wow…” Barry cleared his throat. Not quite as smooth as he liked to think he was normally, but in his defense, it had been a pretty rapid change in subject. “I mean, I’m really flattered, but—”

“Actually, I was talking to him.”

Cisco looked about as surprised to see the finger pointed at him as Barry had been to see the woman there at all (it was hard to sneak up on him these days, so that fact that she’d managed it was impressive). He looked between Barry and the woman a few more times, like he just couldn't get it to compute.

"Um, I'm— I'm sorry, you said you were talking to me?"

“Yeah, I just, told my friends over there that I thought you were cute and they dared me to come over here and talk to you, so. Please talk to me,” the woman finished hopefully

Cisco was at a loss for words, which was odd, because he was _never_ at a loss for words, especially not when confronted with a person he found attractive. Barry figured he needed a little push, which he was happy to give, since this amusing encounter had been the most distracting thing he’d seen all night. He cleared his throat and started to stand from his stool. “Yeah, well, I was just lea—”

There was a hand on his arm before he was even halfway up. “Wait, Barry, don’t—” Cisco tugged Barry back down and looked around him at the woman. “Normally I would, totally, but uh… I kind of already have a date tonight.”

The woman looked stunned. “ _Really?_ ” she said, glancing between the two of them. Barry felt almost insulted.

Cisco grinned sheepishly. “Sorry.”

Barry waited until the woman had wandered back to her friends before speaking up again. “You could’ve gone and talked to her, you know. Still could. Just saying.”

Cisco waved him off. “I said I’d stick around, man. Don’t worry about it.”

It was his choice, Barry supposed. “You could do better than her, anyway.”

Snorting, Cisco turned back to his drink. “Did you actually _see_ her?”

Barry nearly turned around for a second look, despite the fact that the woman had already disappeared back into the crowd, because yeah, he had seen her, but he stood by what he’d said. Maybe he wasn’t giving her enough credit; the bar lighting might have thrown off her look. Though, it didn’t seem to be doing any harm to Cisco, despite the dark shadows being cast across his face and the artificial light playing off his hair…

Well, Barry wasn’t much of a matchmaker. He never would’ve called Iris and Eddie, either.

“Okay, come on with that face. Seriously.”

Barry groaned, rubbing a hand over his face. That distraction hadn’t lasted long, after all. “Is it awful if I can’t stop thinking about my own love life, right now?”

“Uh.” Cisco paused. “Did _you_ like her that much?”

Barry looked up, confused, then realized Cisco was gesturing over his shoulder toward where the woman from before had disappeared. “Oh, no, no. I just mean… Iris.”

“Ohhhh.” Cisco shook his head, breathing out a short laugh. “Yeah, that makes way more sense. I guess she’s still at the hospital, right?”

“Yeah. She told the doctors she and Eddie were engaged so they’d let her in his room. I think she’s planning on staying until he’s awake, at least.”

Cisco whistled. “Smart.”

“She is that,” Barry agreed, with something like a smile.

“Well, what about you and Linda?” Cisco asked, clearly trying to direct them to a more promising topic. “How’s that going?”

“Considering we broke up today, probably not too great.” Cisco made a face like he was going to apologize, so Barry cut him off. “Na, it’s fine. For the best, really. We weren’t working out. Anyway, I think we’re gonna go out for karaoke in a couple weeks.”

“Wow,” Cisco laughed. “I think that’s the healthiest break up story I’ve heard all year.”

“That’s not the part I suck at.” Barry held his breath for a minute to stop the next sentence from coming out, but it couldn’t stay in forever. “I don’t have a chance with Iris.” There it was, out loud for the first time.

He half-expected Cisco to deny this off-hand, but when it was quiet for a few moments, he realized he shouldn’t have. Cisco wasn’t one of those lie-to-make-you-feel-better kind of people. That kind of honesty sucked sometimes, but it was bound to be healthier.

“Tell me to shut up if I’m overstepping here, but if you know there’s really no possibility, maybe it’ll be easier to get over her, finally?”

That’d be nice, Barry supposed, but… “Doesn’t seem very likely.”

“Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” Cisco said certainly. “If you trust Sherlock Holmes to know anything about love.” He frowned. “Which, on second thought…”

“Huh. That line’s from Sherlock Holmes? Was he actually talking about love?”

“Na. But I still think it works. No one ever really pines for _ever_.”

“Sure feels like it,” Barry muttered.

Cisco patted him good-naturedly on the back. “Trust me on this one, Barry. I know what I’m talking about. I mean, look at me. Which do you think I have more experience with: unrequited love, or the other kind?” He grinned. “And to answer your original question: No, I don’t think that makes you awful.”

“You don’t think you’re cutting me too much slack?”

“Barry, my friend. I have literally seen you pull people out of a burning building. I’d be willing to cut you a hell of a lot more slack than that.”

 

 

 

If it were just Barry, he probably could have closed out the bar, but in favor of Cisco’s limited tolerance and general healthy behavior, they called it a night around 12:30. It was late enough that Barry figured he could go home and fall into bed, hope the adrenaline wore off and let him sleep through until mid-morning, when he’d still have to deal with everything that had happened today, but at least he couldn’t mess up anything else.

It was probably a good thing he couldn’t get drunk. This was the kind of night for bad decisions. When he mentioned that to Cisco, he got a laugh in reply.

“C’mon, give me a little credit. I would’ve looked out for you.”

“I think you did, anyway. Thanks for everything. Seriously.” Barry clapped a hand to Cisco’s shoulder and squeezed.

“Sure thing, man. Just let me know next time you have an existential crisis. I’m there.”

Cisco’s words were sincere enough that Barry couldn’t help but pull him all the way in for a brief hug. _I have good friends_ , he thought, and then, _I wouldn’t have._

He’d avoided thinking about it most of the evening, too wrapped up in Eddie’s accident, but it occurred to him again that the person beside him wouldn’t even be here without the changes he’d been complaining about this whole time. They still sucked, but… He couldn’t say he’d go back to the way things were before, not if it meant Cisco was gone. Not yet, anyway, but he’d accidentally traded Singh’s place for Eddie’s; what if someone else died tomorrow instead of Cisco?

 _It would be worth it_ , he thought impulsively, and then felt such a jolt of sickness in his stomach that he had to let go and step backwards. He couldn’t think like that.

“Hey, you’re going to the lab tomorrow, right?”

“Uh, yeah?” Cisco raised his eyebrows. “I guess. Why? It’s not like we have anyone in particular to track down; you already took care of that.”

“I just…” Think of something, think of something. Oh! “I was thinking we should start looking at the time travel thing, if we have some downtime. Figure out how it even happened. I don’t want to do it again by accident.”

He’d hit the magic words. Cisco’s eyes lit up instantly. “Dude, _yes_. I got some stuff ready yesterday; we’re gonna science the shit out of this thing. I know there’s been a lot happening, but when you think about the basics, I mean, _time travel_ , right? This whole thing just keeps getting cooler.”

“Yeah,” Barry agreed easily, though he didn’t exactly share the excitement. Maybe later he’d be able to appreciate it better. In the meantime, this was an easy way to keep track of Cisco tomorrow without letting slip why he was hovering like an anxious mother bear. “I’ll give you a call in the morning, then. We can meet up at the lab.”

“I’ll bring coffee,” Cisco promised. “Ooh, and maybe that multisensor I’ve been working on from home. I still need to fix the casing in place, but I can do that tonight. No better time to test that out than when we have no clue what we’re looking for.”

Cisco had enough ideas to carry the conversation for a few blocks until their path split, with Barry adding little “mmhmm”s or “maybe not”s every so often. They parted ways at the corner, though for a moment, Barry’s feet seemed to stick to the sidewalk. _Nothing happens until Cisco gets to the lab tomorrow, remember?_

To clear his mind of irrational thoughts, Barry ducked into the nearest alley (behind a Chinese restaurant that had been closed for hours), and as soon as he was sure no one would notice his disappearance, took off running. He was careful with his speed on the way home, just in case.

Still, it was fast enough that he didn’t hear the voice that came out of the shadows after he left.

“It’s not as fun, but I suppose we’ll have to do this the hard way.”

 

 

 

Cisco woke up with a pounding headache. Crap, did he really have that much to drink last night? He was pretty sure he’d stopped after three beers.

His hand came up to cradle his head, searching out the source of the pain, which he was surprised to find was localized in one particular area, and that area was marked with a sizeable bump. Wait, back up a minute.

He opened his eyes. Crap, again. Not home, not at the bar, not anywhere at all he knew on sight. Just a room (a really _nice_ room, the kind where the flowers on the mantle matched the accents on the wood) with a desk and some chairs, a couple of dark windows. It was still night.

“ _There_ you are.”

Cisco instantly regretted waking up. He knew that voice, even though he usually heard it distorted by radio. He preferred it that way.

No use pretending he was still asleep, he supposed. Okay, deep breath. Cisco straightened slowly, wincing at the crick in his neck from where it had been slumped awkwardly over the back of the chair. Then, because there wasn’t a gun pointed at him just yet and he wanted to feel like he had at least a little range of motion, he stood up. Dizzy, but doable.

Captain Cold smiled at him. Or maybe he was back to going by Leonard Snart, now that Barry had busted his fancy weapon. “Ready to go, I see. Good. I do have a schedule to keep.”

“What schedule is that?” Rule 1 of being kidnapped by a crazy supervillain: ask leading questions to get them monologuing, equal parts stall tactic and information gathering. The longer they talked, the better.

But Cold only shook his head. “That’s on a need-to-know basis, I’m afraid. The most successful operations are run with every participant knowing only their own piece of the puzzle. Except for the one in charge, of course.”

Of course. “So what’s my piece?”

“You have an awfully high opinion of yourself, don’t you? Assuming you have a piece at all.”

Cisco had to resist retorting that _Cold_ had a pretty high opinion of himself if he thought he could pull one over on the Flash, given how last time had gone. “If all you wanted me to do was sit there, you wouldn’t have let me stand up.”

Cold tipped his head. “Clever boy.” He raised a hand and rapped twice on the door behind him, which swung open a moment later to let a man with arm muscles bulging through his shirt sleeves into the room. “We do, in fact, find ourselves seeking your mechanical skills.”

“What for?” Cisco asked, growing more nervous every moment the newcomer stared at him. “To rebuild your stupid gun? I’m not doing that, no way.”

“Oh, this old thing?” Cold said lightly, and pulled from his bulky coat, with a smooth flourish, the same gun that was supposed to be sitting in police lockup, non-functional. “I got along with this baby pretty well, you know,” he continued, when Cisco could only stare at the gun with a pale face. “Took it apart and put it back together at least a dozen times, got to know what makes it tick. I won’t say rebuilding it was exactly _easy_ — you really outdid yourself with the design — but it was a labor of love.”

“You—” Cisco stuttered, unable to finish the sentence: you’re not a _scientist_. That gun couldn’t be operational, not at the same level of the original. Cold would have needed much more technical know-how than just familiarity to make it work.

As if sensing that disbelief, or maybe just because he really liked using his gun, Cold raised the weapon and let off a shot toward the nearest vase of flowers. The plants were instantly encased in a shroud of ice, frost creeping onto the mirror behind them.

"The graduate student I found to help me out with some of the more technical bits was very excited about it, although he didn't live long enough to write any papers."

Cisco swallowed. Okay, so Cold had his gun back. His partner probably did too; after all, that was a much simpler design, and even if Heatwave hadn’t had the same care for his weapon, it wasn’t that hard to build a strong, compact flamethrower. That was okay, Cisco told himself. Barry had dealt with them before; he could do it again. Though, this did leave him with a pretty important question…

“If you already have your gun back, what do you need me for?”

“Our party is expanding, Cisco.” Cold had wandered over to the frozen plant and was fiddling gently with its icy petals. “We’re in need of a third weapon, something that really puts your creative talents to good use.”

Oh, no. Oh, hell no. Out of the question. Cold and Heatwave were one thing, a thing they’d dealt with before and knew they could beat, but a third partner? Someone with a weapon that Barry wouldn’t have seen before and wouldn’t know how to fight, that _Cisco_ would have built?

“No,” he said, hoping his voice sounded as firm as he meant it to.

Cold tsked. “I thought you might say that.” He turned to the man beside him, the one with tree trunks for arms, and Cisco stiffened. But instead of giving the man any kind of orders, Cold only raised his gun and aimed it at the man’s head.

Cisco had no idea what was going on, but he still felt like he couldn’t breathe, in case the movement of air made something happen.

“So here’s the deal,” Cold explained, leveling his gaze at Cisco without letting the gun’s aim waver in the slightest. “You help us out with this one, very simple request, or I shoot this man in the face, call someone else to drag out the body, and then hold the gun to _his_ head while I ask you the question again.”

Cisco was speechless, a state that didn’t come naturally to him. “You wouldn’t,” he said finally, only able to squeeze out that much when he noticed Cold’s finger starting to tighten on the trigger.

Cold laughed. “Really? You’re going to bet on me caring whether this guy lives through the night? Maybe you’re not as smart as I thought.”

The man hadn’t moved in response to the gun pointed at his head, but when Cisco looked closely, he saw that his jaw had tightened, locking in his expression so hard that his shoulders were shaking slightly. He hadn’t known this was going to happen, Cisco realized, which meant they hadn’t planned this, which meant the threat was real.

“You think I care about him, either?” Cisco tried bluffing. “He’s a criminal. He’s working for _you_.”

“Sure, I suppose he’s not a five-year-old girl clutching a puppy,” Cold admitted. “But he’s still human, and if he dies, it’ll still be your fault.”

Cisco immediately opened his mouth to argue, but he didn’t get half a word in before Cold continued.

“Of course, I’m the one pulling the trigger — something I’m very well practiced at — but the fact is, he’ll be dead because _you_ chose to say no.”

Cisco swallowed. He knew Cold was right; guilt wasn’t logical. He’d just spent an entire evening hearing proof of that, and Barry hadn’t even had a direct hand in Eddie’s accident. Maybe Cisco wouldn’t be the one killing this guy, but he knew he could be the one to save his life, and how could he not, knowing it was an option?

“His name is Brian,” Cold added, and that was it. That was the breaking point. Cisco could not watch him die.

“Alright,” he ground out between clenched teeth. At least the exchange had had one other, unintended effect. He wasn’t scared anymore; he was _pissed_. “What kind of gun are you looking for?”

The gun was lowered to point at the ground, and the man — Brian — visibly sagged, before slinking back through the door and into the hall. Cold didn’t give him a second glance, all his attention on Cisco once more. “I’m sure she has some ideas.”

“She?”

“Lisa, come say hello to our guest,” Cold called over his shoulder. He waited a few moments, and then a woman with wavy brown hair and gorgeous, almost familiar eyes stepped into the room. “Cisco, meet my sister.”

There were two of them? Perfect.

“Hello again, cutie.” She winked, and he wondered for a moment why she’d said ‘again,’ before it hit him. The woman from the bar. This was her, minus the blonde wig and extra makeup and altered attitude.

While Cisco was realizing this, Cold was turning to his sister, looking annoyed. “Must you, really?”

“Leave me be, Len,” Lisa scoffed. “I hardly got to have any fun at all, earlier, when I was so rudely refused.” She looked Cisco up and down, as if trying to find something in him that would justify his rejection.

“You’re not my type.” True, though back at the bar, she’d done a good job of pretending she was. If it hadn’t been for Barry, Cisco probably would have gone with her. _That_ would have been embarrassing, though he might have at least been spared a headache.

“And that boy you were with at the bar? I supposed _he_ was your type?”

Oh, no. She remembered Barry, which meant this conversation was getting dangerous, fast. Abort, abort.

“Him?” Cisco tried to laugh, but he wasn’t sure he came out with any close approximation. “Blind date. There probably won’t be another one.”

“Really?” Lisa raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. “It seemed to go well enough. You two were in there for hours. Made a girl wait, you know.”

“Well, we’re done waiting, now,” Cold interrupted irritably. “And the sooner you tell him what kind of gun you need, the sooner he can get started.”

Lisa nearly pouted. “I would have liked a little more face-time before we got down to business. If you’re going to build something just for me, you should know what I’m like.”

 _I think I can guess_ , Cisco thought to himself.

“The basics, then. Make me something pretty and toxic, like me.” Lisa thought for a moment, then smiled. “Maybe something with gold.”

 

 

 

Despite the fact that Barry didn’t get to bed until nearly one o’clock, he woke up at six, and spent about half an hour trying to get comfortable again before giving up and throwing the covers back to go wander around the kitchen. He poured himself a bowl of cereal, munching on the tasteless granola that Iris had bought for Joe last week (unopened until this morning) and trying to convince himself that it was physically impossible for him to be suffering a hangover.

 _From alcohol, sure_ , his brain reminded him, _but there’s plenty of other chemicals you can flood yourself with and feel it when they’re gone._ Yesterday had been a violent cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol, and since they came from his own body instead of something he ordered at a bar, they were probably adjusted to his current metabolism. Therefore, he felt like shit. Awesome.

He was still bemoaning the cruel twist of fate that had left him with the ability to get hungover but not to get drunk when Joe walked into the kitchen, flipping a tie around his collar with one hand and searching for coffee with the other. Barry lifted his head from its melancholy pose resting on his elbow, surprised to see Joe up so early. “Did you get called in for something?”

Joe shook his head. He’d found the coffee that Barry had started earlier but was still looking for a mug. “I’m going to stop by the hospital before work, see if Iris needs me to bring her anything. I can let everyone know how Eddie’s doing, too.”

Barry straightened instantly, attentive and in mild disbelief that he had just a moment ago been worried about his own headache. “Right. Of course. You haven’t heard anything yet?”

“Tried calling a few minutes ago, but you know how cell reception is at the hospital.” Joe caught his eye, and sent him a reassuring smile, if tight around the edges. “Are you going in to the station this morning?”

“Mm.” Barry shook his head. “Later.”

“Then I’ll call and let you know. Don’t worry, kid.”

Barry glanced at his watch. It was almost seven, so that meant… about four hours left during which he would worry as much as he wanted, thanks. Still, it wasn’t like he could do anything to help Eddie, now; his anxiety was better focused on someone who could still be in trouble. “I’ll have my phone on,” he said, standing from the table. “I’m heading to STAR labs for the day, so someone’ll pick up.” With all the tests that they were going to run, it might end up being Caitlin or Cisco answering the phone, but that worked just as well.

On the way in, he stopped for coffee, figuring that Cisco might need it after last night, and reached the door of the building around the same time as Caitlin, who liked to come in early. She smiled at him as she unlocked the door with her keycard. “I thought I’d have the lab to myself for an hour.”

“Sorry,” Barry said, though she didn’t look upset about it. “I’d offer you coffee, but Cisco’d be pissed if I gave his away before he even showed up.”

“It’ll be cold by the time he gets here, though,” Caitlin said. “He usually comes in around eight.”

Barry shook his head. “He said he’d be in early today. Actually, I kinda thought he’d be here already.” He set the coffee down on the desk when they reached the cortex and pulled out his phone. He should probably give Cisco a call, just to be sure he was on his way. Coffee wasn’t as good when it was reheated.

The line rang several times before it went to voicemail, but Barry didn’t leave a message. He pulled the phone away from his ear and frowned at it. Cisco had been the dictionary definition of ‘surgically attached to his phone’ from the get-go, but several months of hero work had left them all with a nearly obsessive need to answer their calls and respond to texts promptly.

“He’s probably still asleep,” Caitlin offered.

“His phone was on, though. It should’ve woken him up.”

“Didn’t you two go to a bar last night?” When Barry nodded, Caitlin continued. “Don’t forget, we don’t all have your super-metabolism. He probably needs a few minutes to drag himself out of bed.”

Barry wasn’t sure about that. He knew Cisco hadn’t had that much to drink, and it hadn’t been so long that he’d forgotten the effect three beers had on a person — that was, not enough to render you unable to face the world the next morning. But, he could give it a few minutes.

He ended up giving it two, but only because Caitlin was shooting him progressively more frustrated looks as he wandered around the lab, anxiously fiddling with objects that shouldn’t all be touched.

“Pick up,” he muttered as the line rang. “Pick up, pick—”

“You’ve reached Cisco Ra—”

“Crap.” Barry hung up halfway through the message, heart beating faster than he would like to admit. “I’m just… gonna run by and check on him.”

Looking up from the papers on her desk, Caitlin frowned. “Do you really need to wake him up? It sounds like he needs the lie-in.”

Barry didn’t know how to explain to her that he couldn’t get the image of Cisco lying on his apartment floor out of his head. What if something had happened, what if he was never going to make it to work? He should have had more time than this, but…

“Yeah, I’ll be right back.”

Cisco’s apartment was locked. Barry rang the doorbell several times and knocked loudly enough that a woman from next door peeked out and scowled at him, but there was no answer. Officially freaked-out, Barry threw reason completely out the window and just vibrated the lock off the door.

There was no body lying still on the floor, but there was also no Cisco at all. His bed looked recently slept in, although to be fair, Barry had no idea in what state Cisco usually kept his bed. Maybe he hadn’t bothered to make it this morning before heading out, and he’d stopped for breakfast. His phone wasn’t here, when Barry tried calling, so he must have taken it with him. But that didn’t explain why he wasn’t picking up.

Barry turned, about to leave and just try spamming Cisco’s phone with texts until he was forced to answer, when he saw something lying on the desk across the room. Was that… It was, Barry realized, with a closer look. It had to be the multisensor Cisco had been talking about; it had too many lead points to be anything else. And the casing wasn’t finished, just like he’d said.

Even if he’d been running errands before heading to work, Cisco would have taken this with him. He would have finished it, too, he’d been so excited about it last night, but he hadn’t. And he hadn’t been drunk, like Caitlin had suggested, and he hadn’t been exhausted.

He never made it home, Barry realized.

He looked down at his phone. Cisco still hadn’t called him back. Also, it was 7:42, and this was still Barry’s fault.

 


	4. Part IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter started getting long, so I decided to split it up and give you what was originally supposed to be the first half of chapter four, but made it past the ten-page mark anyway. I'm still not giving up on my projected end: we're looking at a probability of six chapters now.... and possibly an epilogue.
> 
> Warning for more major character injury and generalized violence in this section.

Cisco’s hands shook as he welded one of the last pieces of casing into place. The inner mechanisms of the gun had been tested and verified, so the only thing left was to make it look nice and protect the more vulnerable pieces, a process that was going more slowly than it should have because he’d now been awake for more than 40 hours and the last thing he’d had to eat or drink was the beer and peanuts the night before.

It was exactly what they’d asked for, and it was impractical as hell. He hoped that supplying the gold to make it run fucking bankrupted them, if the firing mechanism didn’t wear out first (yeah, he hadn’t exactly built it to _last_ ). Still, it would work, at least for a while.

He scrubbed a hand over his face, trying to wipe the tired haze out of his eyes. If he gave this gun to the Snarts, people would die, probably. But if he didn’t, then people would still die. Definitely. His whole plan here was banking on the fact that Barry was fast enough on the uptake to deal with the new threat before anyone got seriously hurt, and it seemed like a safe bet. Barry was always fast. Whenever Cisco started feeling unbearably guilty about heaping all that responsibility onto his friend, he buried himself deeper in the work, but now it was almost done, and he’d be left alone with his thoughts.

Or, maybe not, because Cold chose that moment to enter the room, Lisa trailing behind him.

“Aren’t you finished yet?” Cold sighed. “We do have places to be, you know.”

Cisco gritted his teeth, reminding himself he only needed to get through the next two minutes without antagonizing them _too_ badly. “Almost.”

Lisa strolled over and leaned against the table, peering over for a better look at Cisco’s work. “I thought you were supposed to be a super-genius or something. You’ve been at it for hours,” she complained.

‘ _You’re the ones who picked me up,_ ’ Cisco thought, pressing the next piece in with a little more force than necessary. The gun _should_ have been impressive enough on its own, even if he’d taken a month to make it, but he couldn’t exactly point that out, not when his stomach was roiling with guilt over having made it in the first place. He forced himself to stay quiet and ignore their impatience.

“It’s done,” he said a few minutes later, placing the gun carefully on the table. “Give it a half-hour or so, some of the connections still need to cool, and— hey, wait!”

Clearly not listening, Lisa had immediately reached over and grabbed the gun, aiming it into the middle of the room with a casual ease that made Cisco shiver. She pulled the trigger, and a stream of gold shot out, coating the nearest chair in a thin layer. She smiled, pleased. Overenthusiastic, but hell, Cisco didn’t really care if she messed up some of the workings by trying to use it too soon.

“Amazing,” she sighed. “I’ve got to show Mick; he’ll be so jealous.”

Cisco doubted it, given the man’s obsession with fire and deep love of his own weapon, but Lisa left the room happily, giving her brother a touch to the shoulder as she passed and exchanging a silent look. Then she was gone, and Cisco was alone with a psychopath. Which was better than being alone with _two_ psychopaths, but still.

“Well.” He tapped at the surface of the table, keeping it carefully between himself and Cold. “Thanks for the work, feel free to _not_ recommend me to your friends.”

Cold rested his gun against his shoulder, stepping forward. Cisco instinctively inched back, maintaining the distance between them. “Oh, Cisco. As if we’d cast you aside so easily.”

Of course, Cisco thought. It had been a long shot, anyway. He hadn’t really expected to just be pleasantly sent off down the road after this. “You got another buddy who needs a gun? You know, your operation is getting pretty crowded.”

Cold smiled at that, the sort of smile you give to a pet that had just done something silly and cute. This time, when he moved forward, Cisco forced his feet to remain still. If he had any hope of turning events in his favor, he had to stand his ground. “You’re right.”

Wait, what?

“I’m not a fan of having more people around than I need, and we have plenty of… firepower…” He paused, hefting his gun with a wry smirk. “Thanks to you. I think it’s almost time to send you on your way, but I do have one last request. Don’t worry, it’s a simple one.”

Cisco watched his eyes carefully, looking for the trick. ‘Send you on your way’ sounded more promising than anything he’d heard all day, but he couldn’t really mean it, could he? There had to be a catch; Cold said he needed something. “But it’s not a gun?”

“No.” Cold tilted his head, considering. “In fact, considerable as it is, we don’t need your mechanical expertise at all. This is nothing you can make with your hands.”

As intent as he was on Cold’s expression, Cisco hardly even noticed the motion of the gun until he heard it power up with a whine. He raised his hands instinctively and sucked in a breath, but couldn’t get any words out before the gun fired. The air escaped back out of his lungs in a low whine.

He collapsed to his knees, curling in around his hands, which only made it worse, except that pulling them away from himself again made it worse too, and he choked on air, staring at his icy fingers.

“Now, I know your thoughts might be a little jumbled right now,” Cold said calmly, crouching down so that he was face-to-face with Cisco, “so I’ll use small words.”

Cisco wanted to ignore him, he did, but his voice was the easiest thing to latch onto as a distraction from the pain. He pressed his hands between his knees to try to warm them, though it made the razor-sharp tingling a thousand times worse and his legs instantly cold, and focused his eyes on the carpet fibers.

“Who is the Flash?”

Cisco let out a short huff, the most he could manage when half his energy was going toward keeping his breathing steady. This was it, this was why Cold wanted him; the gun was just a bonus. But he’d have a much harder time getting it. “You think—” he started, but broke off with a short groan. He wasn’t sure what that sentence was meant to be, probably something about Cold’s terrible interrogation tactics, but he did realize he had to shoot for something much simpler. “Fuck off.”

When Cold laughed, it was calm and certain. His hand shot out and grabbed one of Cisco’s by the blue fingers, squeezing hard, and Cisco couldn’t help it, he _screamed_ , only muffling the noise through gritted teeth. “You know, if we took you to the hospital now, there probably wouldn’t be much lasting damage.” Cold turned the hand over, inspecting it with mocking care. “If not, well. Frostbite is a dangerous thing.”

Cisco didn’t bother insulting him a second time. He just took deep breaths and focused on not going into shock. Cold wasn’t getting an answer, so he wasn’t worth Cisco’s attention.

“You think his life is worth more than yours?”

A grim smile formed on Cisco’s face, even as he shivered harder. Of _course_ it was. Cold was too self-serving to understand it, but Cisco knew. He knew how many people Barry helped, not just fighting crime, but by simply _existing_. If Cisco had to die to keep that in the world, then, well. Okay.

Cold must have seen the decision in Cisco’s face, because he dropped the hand he held, rising to his feet. “I’ll give you some time to think about it,” he said. “Like I said, I’ve got places to be. But when I get back, we can continue this conversation. Maybe I’ll even bring a few guests back to join us.” He swung his gun up casually and took easy steps toward the door. “I’m sure you’ve done some good yourself, working with the Flash. I wonder how much. I wonder how much it would take to unbalance your personal books.”

He left, and Cisco stayed where he was, shaking.

 

 

 

If Dr. Wells sent him one more look of quiet concern when he thought Barry wasn’t looking, Barry was going to scream. He hated it, because he knew it was false. Wells more than anyone knew this was his fault, had told him not to mess with time, and he shouldn’t be wasting pitying looks on Barry when Cisco was the one they needed to help.

If they even could help him, anymore.

Barry had spent the first hour in frantic action, running through the city to check all possible routes between the bar and Cisco’s apartment, the apartment and the lab, the lab and the bar, and any other place he could think of where Cisco might be. He didn’t find anything, but by the time he’d exhausted all possibilities, Dr. Wells had made it in, drawn by Barry’s panicked call, so he returned to STAR Labs. At first, Dr. Wells was far less helpful that Barry had hoped.

“I know you’re very concerned, and we _will_ find him, but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. There are at least a hundred perfectly good explanations for why Cisco would be an hour late to work.”

“I’m telling you, he didn’t get home last night! He left the sensor on his desk.”

By the look on Wells and Caitlin’s faces, it wasn’t a compelling argument.

“And I can’t find him anywhere, now. Where would he be?” His voice shook on the question. He’d already called the hospitals in the area, in case something had happened a little earlier than last time. And, though his fingers didn’t want to dial properly, he’d also called the morgue, and was relieved to hear that no one remotely fitting Cisco’s description had shown up there.

“Family emergency?” Caitlin suggested.

“Perhaps not an emergency. He did have family obligations this week. Have you checked at his parents’ house?”

Barry bit his lip. He hadn’t. It wasn’t an unreasonable idea; he remembered Cisco blowing off an event yesterday to help him out, and maybe in the sober light of morning he’d decided to stop by home and make up for missing it. Still, Barry thought he would have at least texted to say he’d be in late. He would at least be answering his phone.

“It’s not that. Something’s wrong. I know it is.”

Dr. Wells narrowed his eyes, and Barry knew he’d been found out. “Something happened. The first time you lived through this day.” And you know what? Barry didn’t _care_. If it got them to take this seriously, he’d tell them anything they wanted.

“Yeah, something happened. Something bad. Cisco, he…” But he couldn’t finish, not when Caitlin suddenly looked desperate and terrified. “It was bad,” he repeated. “But, nothing was supposed to happen until this morning! If he didn’t get home last night… that’s wrong. It’s different this time.”

“It’s changed,” Wells clarified, and he didn’t sound accusing, only stating a fact, but Barry felt it like a dagger to the heart anyway. ‘ _It’s your fault. You changed it._ ’

“Yes,” he said weakly.

Dr. Wells was silent for a moment. “Tell me what happened.”

Startled, Barry didn’t answer at first. “But you said—”

“I know what I said,” Wells said shortly, his jaw set and stern. “Listen to what I say now, and _tell me what happened_.”

Despite everything — how worried he was and how little he knew and the hard look on Wells’ face — Barry couldn’t help but feel relieved. He _knew_ , he always knew that if Wells learned the truth, he would do whatever it took to save Cisco. Which meant they would do it. They would.

“He was here.” Barry nodded to the room around them. “At the lab. He came in this morning, and I don’t know what happened, but he…” His throat tried to close around the words, but he forced them out anyway. “He died.”

Caitlin gasped, reaching out a hand to steady herself against the desk.

“But it wasn’t like this,” Barry insisted. “That didn’t happen. Instead…” He didn’t need to finish.

“How did he die?” Dr. Wells asked, a look of intense concentration on his face, like he was trying to pull the answer out of Barry without even exchanging words. Caitlin let out a small, wounded noise at the question.

But Barry couldn’t answer. He shook his head. “I wasn’t here. Caitlin found him. She didn’t say what it was.”

“And you didn’t ask—”

“I didn’t think there was anything I could _do_ ,” Barry burst out, interrupting Dr. Wells. “I mean, how would knowing something like that have helped? It didn’t matter. He was _dead_.”

The words echoed horribly in the large room, leaving them all still. Caitlin was the one who broke the silence, pulling herself together all at once.

“Well, he’s not dead now, so let’s find him. Barry, call Felicity. His cell phone is still on, so we can track it down.”

They’d tracked his phone at a coffee shop, which was briefly reassuring, until they found it lying by a dumpster out back. Hours later, that was still the biggest clue they had, and Wells’ initial sternness had faded into a cautious consideration, which Barry took to mean he was looking more and more panicked.

He’d tried to calm down, but it was hard when he didn’t have anything concrete to do. He’d just been staring at a map for the past twenty minutes. Finding the cell phone was promising; it meant someone had probably taken Cisco somewhere on purpose rather than some random car accident or something, which meant he was likely still alive, but the chances of that went down every hour. Barry didn’t like thinking about this in those terms, with all the facts and statistics he’d learned from his time working for the CCPD. But it was either that or go out checking street by street, and he’d already done that for an hour. It was useless, and he didn’t want to be exhausted when they finally found something.

A hand landed on his shoulder, and he jerked. “Did you—”

Caitlin shook her head, biting her lip distractedly as she shot a glance toward where Dr. Wells was working at one of the computers, before she refocused. “Nothing yet. I just… It’s been bothering me…”

“What?” Barry prompted, trying to look attentive when half his attention was still on the useless map. He gave up and just looked at Caitlin when he saw he take a deep breath before saying her next words.

“Are you sure I didn’t say anything? About how Cisco… died?”

Barry blinked. “I didn’t think you’d want to know—”

“I don’t,” Caitlin said softly. “I don’t,” she repeated, stronger this time, “but I keep thinking, I’m a doctor, I would have tried… I would have checked him over. I would have known _something_ , and maybe it’s not important anymore, but…”

“I wish—” Barry cut himself off, grimacing. “It was a short call. There was other stuff happening, city-wide disasters, you know.”

“Still.” Caitlin looked so frustrated, like she could somehow remember what she’d said if she concentrated hard enough, so Barry cast his own mind back to her exact words.

“You said, uh. You didn’t see a wound? There wasn’t any trauma. You didn’t know what happened, but it sounded like you’d only just found him. For a while, I thought… I dunno, it could have just been an aneurysm for all I know, but given our lives, and what’s happening now…”

“No trauma,” Caitlin repeated. “What could—”

Barry’s phone rang, interrupting her. He pulled it out, ready to hit ignore because this was not the time for distractions, but then he realized it was Joe calling. He winced; he’d probably already missed a couple of calls from Joe, even after he’d promised someone would be around to pick up. “I should…” He gestured at the phone, and Caitlin nodded, still lost in thought, and moved away to give him some space. “Joe, hi. Sorry I… How’s Eddie?”

“He woke up this morning.” Barry blew out a long breath, but Joe didn’t exactly sound relieved to be giving the news, just distracted. “Long way to go, but… Barry, Snart’s back.”

Barry froze. “What? Cold is back?” Across the room, Caitlin and Wells perked up.

“He was spotted at the Santini crime family casino.”

“Oh, man.” Barry scrubbed a hand down his face. This day was just getting worse and worse. “I can’t—” But he couldn’t _not_ go after Snart, either.

“Barry, if he’s hitting the Santinis, we could be looking at the beginning of a mob war. I don’t have to tell you what a disaster that would be.”

No, he didn’t. Mob crime wasn’t usually Barry’s game, but if Snart was involved, that changed things. “Joe, listen.” He should have called Joe first, anyway. If he wasn’t using the CCPD, he wasn’t using every resource. “Cisco’s missing.”

“He’s not at work? You can take Snart anyway, Barry, you don’t have to wait for—”

“No, _missing_ ,” Barry repeated. “As in, we can’t find him anywhere. We think something happened.” He didn’t have to get any more specific than that. Joe had been in homicide for years, now. He knew the drill.

“Oh, Barry…”

“I’ll find Snart,” Barry said, because Cisco would kill him if he didn’t, just because of him. “You—”

“I’ll let the captain know, get things started. Where did you see him last?”

“Holdon’s bar. On Cedar.”

“We’ll find him.”

Barry felt a little lighter at the promise, just as he had when Dr. Wells had started to believe him. He hung up and looked to Caitlin and Wells. “I have to go. I’ll be back soon. You guys keep working on it.”

Caitlin frowned. “Barry, Snart is dangerous. Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” Barry assured her. “He doesn’t have the cold gun anymore. Just find Cisco.”

He ran for his suit, trying to focus. Snart _was_ dangerous, and he deserved Barry’s full attention, even if this whole thing felt more like a distraction from what was actually important.

 

 

 

They’d tied his hands in front of him, Cisco suspected, so that he could watch the way the slow fade of ice crystals left his fingers a sickly blue-black. He had to hand it to them; it was working brilliantly. He couldn’t look away.

He took a deep breath and flexed his fingers, wincing when only some of the joints moved the way he told them to. There was a little more motion the second time, but he had to squeeze his eyes shut on a short groan when it also sent a stab of pain through the numbness.

Across the room, Heat Wave snorted. “Don’t be such a baby,” he muttered, fiddling with his own, perfectly healthy fingers. “I’ve been burned worse than that before.”

Cisco ignored him, forcing himself to tear his eyes away from his hands and pull them back in toward his stomach. It was awkward, trying to curl around them when they were tied to the arm of the chair he sat in, but it was better than nothing. The numbness was a bad sign, he knew it was, though he appreciated the way it dulled the pain enough to keep his head clear.

He had to get out. He wasn’t sure exactly how long the Snarts had been gone — twenty minutes? two hours? he’d been pretty fuzzy for a while, there — but they would be back eventually, and things would get even worse.

Everyone always liked to think they would hold up well under torture, but no one really _knew_ until they had to try. Cisco had no desire to test his own will, didn’t want to know if he turned out to be the kind of person who caved easily. And if they brought someone else back, too, and aimed the gun at them? There was no way to win. Someone was going to die, maybe Barry, and Cisco couldn’t be responsible for that. He couldn’t.

So he had to get out.

It was a stupid plan, and with more time and better blood flow he might have come up with something more viable, but what the hell. The only risk was that he might get himself killed, and no matter what promises Cold had made, he knew there was no real chance of being let out of here alive.

“Hey, Mick,” he said, trying to make the name come out as irreverently as possible. “I have to use the bathroom.”

Heat Wave didn’t even look up. “‘M not stupid, kid.”

Yeah, but wouldn’t it have been nice if he’d fallen for that? Cisco swallowed. “Yeah, well. You look it.”

The movement of Heat Wave’s hands stilled.

“It’s lucky you have Snart to rebuild your gun for you and everything, because—”

“ _I_ rebuilt this,” Heat Wave snarled, rising from his seat and pulling out his gun in one fluid motion. “You think Len knew enough about my baby to recreate it by himself? All he cares about is his little ice machine.”

“Oh, right.” Cisco hoped he sounded confident, instead of as shaky as he felt. Heat Wave was even quicker to anger than he’d thought, which was technically what he wanted, but it certainly didn’t make him feel comfortable. “Well, I guess the flamethrower is a simpler design.”

Heat Wave’s lip curled up. Cisco honestly couldn’t tell whether it was meant to be a snarl or a grin. “Oh, it’s plenty lethal. Do you want to try it?” He held the gun casually in one hand, like it was just a coincidence it pointed toward Cisco.

Cisco tried to laugh, failed miserably, gave up on sounding calm, and lied. “I know he told you not to hurt me.”

It was definitely a grin, this time. A moment later, Heat Wave’s empty fist shot out and caught Cisco along the cheekbone. “Wrong.” He stepped in even closer, looming over the chair. “Anything else you wanna say about me?”

He could stop now, Cisco considered. He could just stop, shut up and sit back and Heat Wave would get bored and wander away, and he could wait here quietly with his hands numb and his cheek burning. But then Cold and his sister would come back, and he couldn’t be around when that happened. ‘ _Remember Barry,_ ’ he thought to himself, and did: Barry, absurdly bright in the dim light of the bar and grinning his megawatt grin as he gave up trying not to laugh at a bad joke. ‘ _You can’t let him down._ ’

“Just this.” Cisco pulled his foot back and kicked straight out, sending his heel into Heat Wave’s knee.

The noise it made was satisfying, but Heat Wave was quick to recover, moving forward with startling ferocity and shoving Cisco’s chair back into the wall. It hit with a _crack_ and tumbled to the side, and Cisco had barely hit the floor before Heat Wave was on him. He seemed to have used up all his words.

He scrambled with his hands, running them along the wood until, _yes_ , part of the armrest had cracked on impact. Another punch flung his head to the side and he couldn’t see, but he pulled his hands around and reached up blindly. He found Heat Wave’s face and pushed up, digging his blackened fingers into the man’s eyes. He didn’t have the dexterity for anything else.

Heat Wave yelled and pushed backward, and Cisco twisted onto his side, searching for anything to use. He nearly laughed when he found the heat gun, lying on the floor right beside them. His hands barely worked together well enough to grab the gun, but he balanced it between his palms and hefted it up, figuring he could work out specifics like the trigger as he went. He lifted the gun, sitting up, and felt any trace of triumph fade.

He should have known. Heat Wave may have played favorites with his guns, but he always packed something extra.

 

 

 

By the time Barry made it to the casino, it was a mess. Tables tipped over, people cowering in corners, and a shape in the middle of the room, like a man covered in gold. Barry’s jaw clenched.

He ripped a man out of the way before Snart could hit him with — was that the cold gun? “How many times are we gonna go through this, Snart?

Snart leapt up from behind his barricade, hefting what was _definitely_ some form of his cold gun — how had he gotten hold of that again? And the woman with him, her weapon seemed to shoot out liquid gold. “Until the best man wins!”

Barry didn’t have time for this. Before Snart could shoot, he dashed around and grabbed the woman, pointing the gun at her head. He didn’t how exactly it worked, but he knew it had to be dangerous. “Drop the gun.”

To his credit, Snart did. Or put it up, anyway, in an instantaneous reaction that revealed how much he must care about the woman, no matter what the shit-eating grin on his face tried to hide. “We both know you’re not going to do anything to her.”

It was true, and there was no use denying it, but the fact remained that Snart couldn’t shoot him without her getting in the way, and he clearly wasn’t any more willing to hurt her than Barry was.

“Oh, by the way. Meet my baby sister. Lisa, Flash; Flash, Lisa.”

Barry glanced at the woman’s face. Two Snarts? God, that was just what he needed. Lisa smirked at him a little, apparently unconcerned by her position. He could see the family resemblance. In fact, she looked incredibly familiar.

He stopped caring about that when Snart spoke again, freezing from the very first word. “Cisco has been very, very busy.” No. Oh, no, no, this was so much worse than whatever he’d thought. “Unless you want me to mail small, frozen pieces of him back to his family, I’d take your hands off her.”

There were voices coming through the comm, a hissed, “Dr. Wells! Dr. Wells, get over here, he says—” The rest was muffled, but Caitlin had obviously been listening to them.

Cisco was alive, if they could believe Snart, which Barry was inclined to, if only because it suited Snart’s interests. But they’d had him for more than twelve hours now, and a lot could happen in that time. Barry let his grip on Lisa fall limp.

“Let him go, Snart.” His hands were practically vibrating at his sides. What was he supposed to do?

Snart smiled, at ease again now that his sister was back by his side. “I’ll think about it.

And, no. No, that wasn’t good enough. He needed Cisco back, _now_. He couldn’t just let them go, not when he knew how to get to Cisco. He was so _close_.

‘ _Think._ ’

He _couldn’t_ think, even with time slowing down around him as Cold turned away. He couldn’t— if only they’d left Cisco’s phone with him, if only they had _something_ he could track. When he got Cisco back, he was fitting him and everyone else at STAR with a permanent tracking device, he swore it. He had one built into his suit, so why didn’t they—

‘ _It is so messed up that you just know my heart rate all the time._ ’

Barry sucked in a breath, and reached up quicker than the eye could see to tug out his earpiece, cutting off the worried voices on the radio. With a burst of pent-up energy, he dashed forward and grabbed Snart by the collar. “You don’t touch him,” he spat, inches from Snart’s face. “I can still come after you.”

Snart chuckled. “I don’t think you’ll risk him.” He pushed away, and Barry let him go.

It didn’t matter that he hadn’t registered the threat. It didn’t matter that he was leaving.

Nothing mattered but the tiny earpiece that had been slipped into one of Snart’s bulky pockets.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't panic. Chapter five is already in progress.


	5. Part V

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for like... violence and blood and stuff. I tagged for show-level violence but I feel like it's a little past that, so. Fair warning. Read on for the Dramatic Climax Chapter.

It was a small, blinking dot travelling slowly across a map of the city, and it had the attention of everyone in the room. They watched it weave along roads, leaving downtown behind before finally entering into a residential area.

“What’s down there?” Barry asked impatiently. He didn’t take his eyes off the screen, trying to will the dot to stop somewhere permanently.

“Upscale neighborhood,” Felicity muttered, over the rapid typing that echoed through the link. “Plenty of space between properties, lots of privacy. It’s a good place to hide out. And… Oh. The house at the end belongs to Don Santini, same family as the casino Snart hit.”

Barry stood up. “Then that’s where I’m going.” He pulled his mask up over his head, checking the fit to make sure the replacement earpiece was in place.

“Whoa, wait.” Caitlin placed a hand firmly on his chest, blocking his path. “You can’t just go running off; we need a plan.”

“I have a plan,” Barry snapped. “Go in, grab Cisco, drag Snart to the nearest jail cell.”

“Is that what passes for plans over there?” Felicity asked lightly. “Boy, I haven’t been giving Oliver enough credit. You know the Santini house will have tons of cameras and security measures, right?”

Barry glanced at the screen. The dot had stopped at the end of the street. He tensed. “We don’t have _time_ —”

“It’ll take you a few seconds to run over, won’t it? Plenty of time.”

He let out a long breath. “Thanks.” And then, because it wasn’t like he hadn’t noticed the tremor that Felicity had been trying to hide from her voice, “I’ll bring him back.”

“You better.”

“Barry.” Dr. Wells caught his arm, and Barry nearly shouted. He had to _go_. “It’s worth considering, if the Snarts have gotten Cisco to build things for them, you’ll need to be extremely cautious.”

Shaking his head, Barry pulled away. He’d caught a glimpse of the newest gun in action: the gold shot out quickly enough to be impressive to someone of average speed, but he knew he would have no trouble avoiding it. “He wouldn’t have made anything that could really hurt me. I’ll be back soon.”

He left before anyone else could try to delay him.

 

 

 

This was not going according to plan. Eobard Thawne did not appreciate when things didn’t go according to plan.

Barry wasn’t supposed to be able to affect the timestream. Not yet, and not nearly so much. And despite his best efforts to contain the situation, Eobard himself had given implicit permission to continue this meddling, all because of one boy who shouldn’t matter as much as he did.

A boy who was dangerous already, Eobard reminded himself. Cisco was clever, sometimes too clever for his own good, and it wasn’t as though Eobard hadn’t noticed the way Joe had tried pulling him into his own suspicion-fueled investigation. But whatever evidence they might find, none of it would match the body he held now, and Eobard had been proud to overhear Cisco defending him. Why would he want to hurt Barry’s family?

Eobard smiled ruefully. Why, indeed. Not for any reason they could know about, but. Still.

Barry remembered no details about Cisco’s apparent death, which was just fine for his own sake, but it made it frustrating for Eobard to reconstruct what might have happened. Had it been a random tragedy, triggered by the smallest of changed events? Or had Cisco made himself just a little too dangerous? He would have to keep an eye on the boy, when Barry brought him back.

This might necessitate an adjustment of the plan’s timeline, but if Barry could already jump through time, even by only a few days, it was feasible. He would worry about that later. When Cisco was back.

Eobard gritted his teeth. He shouldn’t care, he reminded himself. All of these people were long dead, anyway. He shouldn’t care at all.

 

 

 

There were gates around the Santini house, and plenty of cameras, as predicted, but Felicity’s voice in his ear assured him they had been taken care of. A second later, the gate clicked quietly open. “Thanks,” Barry muttered, slipping through and closing it behind him. He could have gotten around it on his own, but this, he admitted, was much easier. It was safer, too. Maybe he was fast enough that it hardly mattered whether they saw him coming or not, but Cisco didn’t have the same advantage.

In milliseconds, Barry was inside the house, keeping an eye out for anything suspicious. There were a couple of guys he didn’t recognize waiting in a front room, but they looked more like leftovers from Santini’s gang than anyone Snart would have drafted into his operation. Barry sped past them, searching the rooms.

“Come on, come on.” He’d arrived only seconds after Snart, and it would be so much easier if he could find what he was looking for before Snart could get comfortable here. Where could—

There, he heard muffled shouting from a room at the back of the house. He paused outside the door.

“Mick! We need him!”

The door opened with enough force to crash into the wall, and Barry flew inside, ramming into the source of the voice before Snart even noticed the intrusion. Snart’s head hit the wall with a satisfying _thunk_ , and Barry turned around a second later at the sound of a gun cocking. He ripped it out of Heat Wave’s hands and flung it across the room, shoving the man back into Lisa so they both toppled to the ground, and only then took a good look around the room.

It took him an extra second to spot Cisco, and less time than that to forget everything else. He was on the ground in the same breath, searching for a pulse and panicking when his altered perception of time meant he didn’t feel anything for what felt like too long. But, no, it was there.

“Cisco, no, no… Guys, he’s been shot.” And his hands… No, focus. Prioritize. The chest wound was more important. He pushed hair back from Cisco’s eyes, wishing they would open.

“Get him out of there!”

He hesitated for a second longer until he felt the brush of a hand against his arm. Before it could grab hold, he wrenched himself out of the way, scooping Cisco off the ground and taking off. They were out of the house before anyone could react, but at the motion, Cisco reacted for the first time since Barry had spotted him. His head twisted to the side as he coughed and groaned.

Barry skidded to a stop just inside the gate, disturbed by the trickle of blood that had appeared at the corner of Cisco’s mouth. He set him down again, gently, but even that much was too jarring, and Cisco’s breathing sped up instantly.

“He’s coughing blood, I think the bullet hit his lung.”

“You have to get him to the hospital,” Caitlin said, more calmly than she would be if she could see him right now. “The bullet needs to come out as soon as possible.”

But Barry was a fast ride, not a smooth one, and he’d already shifted the bullet enough to cause more bleeding. “I can’t move him,” he said frantically. “I can’t— There has to be something I can do to stabilize him or…”

Cisco’s eyes were moving beneath their lids, like he was dreaming. Barry put a hand on his shoulder, trying to get his attention, make himself recognizable, but there was no reaction.

Caitlin and Felicity were arguing over the radio. A car was starting somewhere behind him. Barry barely heard any of it. He wished he could see exactly where the bullet was, where it was in danger of shifting. A little movement probably wouldn’t cause too much damage, not when they could be at the hospital in moments, but if it burrowed deeper into the lung, or even nicked the aorta…

“Barry, you can take the bullet out.”

His head jerked up at Dr. Wells’ words. “What? No, I don’t know how. I don’t even have any equipment with me, how...”

“No, just you. You can reach in and remove it.”

“What?” Barry repeated, breathless.

Everyone else had gone silent as Dr. Wells spoke over the link. “If you vibrate your hand at the natural frequency of air, your body, your cells will be in a state of excitement that should allow you to phase through his chest. All you have to do then is take the bullet back out with you. You can do this. I believe in you.”

“I can’t,” Barry said. Cisco was still breathing too fast, still trailing blood from his mouth. Barry felt like he was about to start hyperventilating himself. He’d been determined to save Cisco, but this? How had _this_ come down to him?

“Listen to me, Barry. Breathe.” Dr. Wells’ voice was certain, calming, steady. “Breathe. Vibrate your hand, and feel the motion.”

Barry did, looking warily between his blurred hand and Cisco’s chest, wondering how this could do anything but hurt.

“Feel the air, and the ground, and the lightning, Barry. Feel the lightning. Feel it’s power.”

Barry closed his eyes.

“It’s electricity pumping through your veins, crackling through you, traveling to every nerve like a shock.”

He felt it, encompassing him, so much that he realized the rest of his body was starting to vibrate too. He tried to tamp down on the motion, confining it to one arm, and felt that arm move even faster at the concentration of energy.

“You’re no longer you, now. You’re part of something greater. You’re part of the speed-force. It’s yours.”

He felt _all_ of it, every word Wells was saying, and how could he know this so well, how—

“Now do it.”

He couldn’t really—

“Now.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, in case this didn’t work.

As he moved his hand into place, Cisco’s eyes suddenly shot open and focused on his face, looking terrified. “Wai—”

But it was already done. Barry’s hand plunged into his chest, fingers gliding through until they found a patch that felt different against the vibration. He grabbed hold of the bullet, conforming it to his own frequency and pulling back out. He opened his fist to find the bullet intact, and dropped it to the side.

Cisco’s eyes were closed again, but he was still breathing. Maybe a little easier, or maybe that was just wishful thinking. Barry hadn’t left any new marks.

He marveled at the sight for another fraction of a second, then placed his hands beneath Cisco’s body and lifted him, running for the hospital. If the movement jarred anything else, Cisco didn’t react.

 

 

 

By now, the emergency room staff at Central General Hospital was used to the Flash blowing in out of nowhere with a bleeding patient, so there was a brief moment of surprise, but not panic, when he entered.

“He’s been shot,” he told the nurses who immediately rushed forward. They gestured to an open bed in the trauma bay, where he laid Cisco, stepping back quickly to let the medical staff fill in the space.

“How long ago?” one of them asked, as her co-workers went into action behind her: attaching leads and grabbing gauze. One took a pair of scissors and sawed off the rope around his wrists, then moved on to remove his shirt.

“Less than ten minutes, I think.” Heat Wave had still been holding the gun when he’d entered. If he’d been just a little bit faster... “The bullet’s out.”

Two of the nurses levered Cisco up partially onto his side to check his back. “I don’t see an exit wound,” one called.

The nurse asking questions leveled a sharp look at Barry.

“The bullet’s out,” he repeated, and the nurse nodded, deciding to take it for granted.

“Any other major trauma?” She glanced over her shoulder briefly. “What happened to his hands?”

“He— Captain Cold,” Barry said by way of explanation. They’d had several patients come through in the past months with injuries from the same gun. They knew what it meant.

The nurse didn’t ask why Cold was doing damage again when the last big news had been him locked up in jail and the gun disabled. She just turned and began speaking rapidly to the doctor who had been pulled over to the scene.

The first couple of times Barry had showed up with an injured civilian, he’d been shuffled quickly out of the room as soon as the medical professionals took over. As he came by more and more, they’d started to treat him like an unofficial EMT, trusting him enough to answer more questions and to stand out of the way while they worked. They didn’t care if he hung around for a while; sometimes they even sent him off to deliver a quick message.

Barry took advantage of that now. He had no doubt that, if they knew how well he knew Cisco, they would insist he leave, that he couldn’t be impartial and hold himself back. But as long as he didn’t tell them, they would let him stay.

So he got to stand and watch as the nurses packed gauze over the bullet wound and warming pads around Cisco’s hands. He watched them put a tube down his throat and point to the numbers on the monitors. He watched the doctor shake her head with her stethoscope over her ears — “severely diminished breath sounds on the left side” — and ask for a needle. He watched the needle slide between Cisco’s ribs.

“We’ve got the fluids started?” she asked a nurse, who nodded. “Let’s get some blood up here too, looks like he’s lost a lot. Do we have a type?”

“O positive,” Barry said, and three separate heads turned his way. His cover was definitely blown.

The nurse he’d spoken to earlier nodded at the doctor — who turned and continued relaying orders — and stepped around the crowd toward Barry. “Got a name for him?”

“Cisco Ramon.”

The nurse tapped a passing aide. “Pull up the records for Cisco Ramon, birthdate…” She glanced at Barry.

“Uh. August 18, nineteen-ninety, um... Ninety-two.”

“Any known medications or pre-existing medical conditions?” The nurse asked as the aide walked away.

“No. Not that he ever… I don’t think so.”

“Allergies?”

Barry shook his head.

“Okay,” she said. “That helps a lot. Thank you.”

Nodding, Barry glanced back over her shoulder. The motion around Cisco had slowed somewhat, and the monitors were beeping less frantically than before, which must have had something to do with all the tubes hooked up around him. That had to be a good sign, right?

The nurse put a hand on his shoulder and waited until he looked her in the eye. “You know him well?” She took his silence for a yes. “Why don’t you go sit down somewhere?”

“I can’t, I—” He gestured to the bed. He couldn’t leave Cisco alone. He shouldn’t have done it before, but at the very least, he wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

“You really should. You’re shaking.”

He looked down at his clenched fists, vibrating slightly. He hadn’t even noticed. “...Okay.”

She led him to a chair just outside of the sliding glass door of the trauma bay, and he sat down heavily. Curtains partially obscured his view, but he could see enough of what was happening to notice if anything major changed. That would be enough.

“Do you remember me?” the nurse asked, and he shook his head guiltily. She smiled. “It’s okay. I’ve been around when you’ve brought people in before, but it’s not like we’ve exchanged names, and you’re far more memorable. I’m Cassandra,” she added. “I’m going to head back in, but you can sit here as long as you need, okay?”

As soon as she was gone, Barry lowered his head into his hands, taking deep breaths. The room was crowded with staff and EMTs and patients, and he was probably getting some weird looks right now. He could only imagine they got worse when he started talking to no one (or, no one they could hear), but he didn’t care.

“He’s with the doctors. You probably heard.”

“Is he stable?” Caitlin asked.

“They’re still working on him. Hey, someone should call Joe. Tell him to call off the search.”

“I’ll do it.”

“You did excellently, Barry,” Dr. Wells assured him. “Everything you could.”

And even things he didn’t know he could do. Barry lifted his head and stared at the hand that had pulled a bullet out of his friend’s chest. He never would have thought of that, but Wells seemed to know what to do instantly, and just how to talk him through it. The way he described the lightning…

Barry pushed the thought out of his head; it didn’t fit there right now. Later, when he knew Cisco would be alright, then there would be time to go over everything.

It was at least two hours before anyone approached him again. He watched through the door, but didn’t move from his chair. At least a dozen ambulances had cycled through, paramedics dropping off patients and nudging each other when they spotted him. But no one tried to disturb him, until Cassandra tapped him on the shoulder.

“He’s stable. They’re moving him to a room.”

Barry blinked. “He’s not going into surgery?” It was a gunshot wound, after all. Didn’t things like that always need surgery?

Cassandra shook her head. “We’ve got the bleeding under control, and...” She paused. “You know, technically, I can’t tell you all this unless you’re family. That’s the law.”

“Technically,” he countered, “as a vigilante, pretty much everything I do is illegal.”

“Fair enough. He’s got a chest tube in for the pneumothorax, and between that and the ventilator he’s breathing alright for now. We’ll have to see how he does; if he has trouble coming off the ventilator he may need surgery then, but he’s being moved to the ICU now for monitoring.”

“And.” Barry swallowed. “His hands?”

“Rewarming went well, which is promising, but it’s a long healing process. It might be a few weeks before he can be properly assessed for any non-viable tissue.”

“A few weeks?” Barry choked out. He refused to focus on the other part of the sentence, the ‘non-viable’ part.

“Like I said. Long process. He’ll be here for a few days, at least.”

“Thanks,” he said wearily. “I should— Has anyone called his family?”

She glanced over her shoulder, catching the eye of a man on a computer. “I’ll have to pass you over to Josh for that.”

“Okay.” Barry paused before he left her, feeling like he should say something more. “Seriously, thanks. I…”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m sure I’ll see you again; I’m here a lot.” She laughed a little, turning back to the trauma bay. “Too much, probably.”

According to Josh, they didn’t have the number for Cisco’s family on file, but his emergency contact had said he’d let them know.

“His emergency contact?”

Josh checked the screen. “A Mr. Harrison Wells.”

Right, of course. Barry caught sight of Cisco’s bed moving, through the glass doors. If he was going to a room, it was probably time to go back. Change into civilian clothes. Hanging around Cisco in the Flash suit was only going to make him more of a target.

 

 

 

Barry had actually forgotten that he knew more than one patient in the ICU.

“Barry!” Iris called softly, then louder after she had shut the door to Eddie’s room behind her. “Barry, I’m so glad you’re here.”

She threw her arms around him and Barry let her, waiting for the rush of longing that came every time. Except… It wasn’t gone, but it was _less_. He already felt scared, and guilty, and frustrated, and a hundred other things. Maybe he was just full, done, couldn’t fit any more.

“I just stepped out,” Iris said as she pulled back, “but he’s doing so much better already. His mom’s in with him now.” She gestured over her shoulder, and Barry looked, surprised, to see Eddie lying there with his eyes actually open, groggy but awake and talking with an older woman. After a moment, Eddie caught him watching and sent him a tired wave. Barry waved back.

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” Iris sighed. “It looks like his leg took the bulk of it, which is… Anyway, they’re talking about moving him to a regular room tomorrow, and— Barry?”

He wasn’t sure what had made her stop until he heard himself say, “Yeah?” It came out watery and soft, and oh, he thought he’d come down from the adrenaline in the emergency room, but obviously he wasn’t done collapsing.

She hugged him again, and this time he didn’t take anything but comfort from it. He couldn’t. He didn’t have the room for it.

“Eddie’s okay,” she whispered, a little uncertainly, because she didn’t know what else it could be. Barry found that he didn’t have the energy to explain it to her, so he just grabbed her hand and led her down the hall. They stopped outside a door with the number Josh had given him. “Oh, no.”

“They won’t let me in to see him,” Barry said. It had only just occurred to him. Family only, right? Or almost-fiancés.

Iris looked strangely intense, staring through the window of Cisco’s room. She knew he and Barry were close, of course, but she herself hadn’t spent that much time around Cisco. “Yes, they will,” she said sternly, and Barry wondered just how much Iris was making a habit out of lying to medical personnel.

A lot, apparently.

Because she was already dragging a nurse aside and telling him in a vaguely threatening tone that Barry was Cisco’s “partner, so you can't keep him out, that isn't legal anymore, and I'm not going to stand here and watch..."

She probably would have kept going, except that the nurse glanced over her shoulder at Barry, then at the room he was standing in front of, and smiled. "You're here for Ramon?"

Barry nodded.

"Cassie mentioned someone would be coming by for him." Cassie? Oh, Cassandra, from the emergency room. Barry hesitated at the realization; she already knew he cared about Cisco, obviously anticipated he would come back without a mask, it wouldn't be hard for her to figure out who he was if he kept going along with this.

But what was his other option? Leave?

Any possibility of that went out the window the second the nurse said, "You can go ahead in." Then there was something else about coming by later to take some vitals, but Barry didn't hear it. Iris was already shoving him to the door, saying she'd knock later and bring him some coffee, and then he was inside.

He sat down heavily in the chair beside the bed, and waited for whatever happened next.

 


	6. Part VI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're winding down the the end, folks! Just one more update after this!

Cisco's family showed up in full exactly once.

His parents came together the first night, and one or the other spent about an hour hovering around every day, asking the nurses questions and looking uncomfortable, unsure what to do with their son so still. Barry made sure he was out of the room when this happened, not wanting to reveal how he'd managed to get in in the first place. He didn't know how Cisco's parents would react to the idea of their son having a partner, much less a man, much less someone they'd never met before.

His brother Dante came only the one time, wandering in behind his parents the morning after Cisco arrived at the hospital. He stopped just outside the door to the room, though, even as his parents bustled in with anxious energy. They moved around, rearranging chairs without ever sitting in them, studying the monitors with extreme concentration. Dante looked through the window and frowned. Eventually, Barry broke the silence.

“They said he’s doing well,” he offered, since Dante hadn’t so much as glanced at a single doctor, and Barry didn’t know how much his parents might have talked about it at home. “I mean, nothing’s for sure, but he’s stable right now.” Dante didn’t move his gaze from the bed. “I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

Dante snorted, finally reacting to Barry’s words. “Yeah, I’m sure he will be.” Barry watched Dante tap a fist against the ledge below the window, rocking back onto his heels. “This is just like him,” he hissed.

Barry’s eyebrows furrowed. “What?”

“He _always_ does this,” Dante continued, frustration breaking through in the way he gritted his teeth around the words.

“Does what?” Barry asked. “Gets _shot_?” He reminded himself that a hospital wing was no place to get hysterical. Well, it was, but it still wouldn’t be helpful.

“Or gets his arm broken or fucks up his kidney,” Dante grumbled. “Whatever. He gets in over his head. He doesn’t know when to stop.”

This wasn’t the place to have this conversation, but Barry kept talking anyway. “Do you even know what he does?” Because he couldn’t, really. It was only a half-kept secret that STAR Labs worked with the Flash, but if Dante had any real concept of that, he wouldn’t use a phrase like ‘in over his head.’

“He works at that lab that everyone hates, yeah. Never learned how not to make himself a target.”

Barry clenched his jaw. “He works with the police, too. He helps people.” In ways Barry couldn’t explain, not here, not in public.

Dante just shrugged, eyes on the hospital room.

Barry assumed the conversation was over until Dante took in a breath and spoke.

“Did you know that this one time, when he was ten, he asked Ma for a soldering iron? I mean…” He shook his head, like he didn’t have to explain why that was ridiculous. Barry didn’t bother to mention that he’d asked for molecular modeling kits at the same age. “He wanted to learn how to build circuit boards, so he could work with computers. He wanted to help people then, too. Except Ma wouldn’t get him one because it was dangerous, so he found a neighbor who had one and said he was thirteen and he knew how to use it.

“I mean, he didn’t. Because he doesn’t bother to do things right, he just—” Dante flung out a hand. “Jumps into it. So, of course, the first day he tried using it, he managed to drop the thing on his leg, burned himself pretty bad. He didn’t tell anyone. Ma only noticed because it got infected and he had a fever.”

Barry had never heard this story before. He’d seen the scar, the first and only time he’d seen Cisco wear shorts, but that was when they barely knew each other. They were recording some baselines for people _without_ superspeed, so Caitlin had shown up with her hair in a ponytail and Cisco had worn running shorts. It hadn’t exactly been appropriate to ask, though knowing Cisco like he did now, he probably could’ve gotten an answer.

Dante remembered this with all the intensity of an older brother’s embarrassing story, and none of the fondness. “He never learns anything.”

 _It’s his fault_ , Barry heard, and he wanted to scream. He couldn’t though, because if mentioning the real reasons Snart had been interested in Cisco was dangerous, bringing up the fluctuations in time that had pitted Cisco against the universe would be a disaster.

“You should leave,” he hissed instead, even though Dante was Cisco’s brother and Barry was just some guy who said he was a friend, who none of their family even knew at all, and what right did he have to be telling people off?

Dante wouldn’t have been wrong to get angry, but he didn’t. He just shot one last look at his parents and shrugged. “Tell ‘em I’ll wait downstairs.”

 

 

 

After that, Barry had tried to avoid talking to the Ramons. He often left the hospital completely during their visits, running home for a shower or to the station to speed through a day’s work in twenty minutes. Sometimes he couldn’t even convince himself to go that far, and just wandered upstairs to check on Eddie, now alert and recovering slowly in a regular room. He was in remarkably good spirits for someone who had woken up to find part of a leg missing.

“Back on the antibiotics again?” Barry asked as he walked in, nodding at the new (old) drip on the IV pole. He handed Iris the bag he’d picked up from the cafe downstairs.

Eddie sighed and leaned back into his pillows. “Like clockwork. Is my leg more messed up than they’re telling me or is it really just _this_ easy to get sick in a _hospital_?”

“Neither,” Iris said, digging into the bag. She pulled out the scone first and handed it over to Eddie with a napkin, then found her croissant, sighing happily at the smell. “It’s the night nurse,” she continued, after she’d taken a bite. “She wants to keep you, you know. You’re too adorable for your own good, especially when you’re hopped up on painkillers.”

Eddie grinned. “You know you love me babbling about your hair like that.”

“I do.” Iris nudged him. “You should do that more often. I mean, in general. Also, sometime when Penny can hear, because after an hour or so of that, I think even she’ll get the message you’re not available.”

Barry laughed at that. It was true; you couldn’t spend much time around either of them these days without getting smacked in the face with how happy they were together. He knew how relieved Iris was that Eddie was doing so well, how grateful she was to still have him.

It hurt, of course it did, but it was a dull ache, a fading pain with the promise of eventual relief. It helped to see them together, the proof that Iris was happy, because that was what he wanted, really. It also helped that so much of his attention was focused elsewhere. Speaking of which…

“I should get going.”

Iris looked up from Eddie immediately and fixed him with a stern look. “You literally just got here.”

“I was just dropping off the food.” Barry gestured to the bag. “I gotta get back down—”

“You know he’s in a _hospital_ , right? He’s safe.”

“Except from infections,” Eddie pointed out, and then coughed awkwardly and crammed the scone into his mouth when Iris glared at him.

“My _point_ ,” she continued, turning back to Barry. “Is that you don’t know when he’s going to wake up, but he has people taking care of him until then, and you have things to do in the meantime. I haven’t seen you leave him alone for more than ten minutes.”

Barry shrugged. It would have been a fair point, but she didn’t know what he could get done in ten minutes. Not to mention, what _else_ could happen in ten minutes. They hadn’t heard anything from or about Leonard Snart since he’d run off, losing the tracking signal twenty minutes later, so they had no idea when he might reappear. Not to mention, Barry wasn’t sure yet that the universe had forgiven and forgotten. Anything could happen.

“I’ll take a break this afternoon,” he lied. She didn’t buy it for a second.

“I should march down there and tell them you’re not really his boyfriend,” she muttered.

Barry patted her arm. He knew she wouldn’t, really. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll come by again later.” He nodded goodbye to Eddie, extracted himself from Iris’ attentions, and turned down the familiar path to the ICU.

In theory, he wouldn’t be taking it much longer. They’d removed the breathing tube this morning, and there’d been a heart-stopping moment when Barry was sure it would all go wrong, but then Cisco was breathing, so Barry did, too. The doctor had wanted to wait a few more hours to make sure, but he seemed stable. He just wasn’t awake yet.

Barry hoped Cisco waited to wake up until he’d switched rooms, now that it was happening soon. Waking up in the hospital was shitty either way, but the ICU was particularly dramatic. Not to mention, he knew of a lot of people who’d be upset if they weren’t allowed in the second Cisco opened his eyes. Barry poked his head in the door. Yep, still asleep, and his mother had gone for the day, so Barry went inside and sat down in his usual chair.

Maybe he should call STAR and let Caitlin and Dr. Wells know that the tube was gone. No, better wait until the room change. If something didn’t go well, they could still put it back in. Anyway, they’d appreciate the call more if they could come by and visit afterward.

Not for the first time, Barry sank a little deeper in his chair, feeling guilty that he was the only one allowed into this room. It didn’t seem fair; Caitlin and Dr. Wells were as much Cisco’s family as he was (probably more, since they’d known him longer), but the doctor’s insisted on only letting in Cisco’s legal family, instead. And him, for which he counted himself lucky, and considered it his duty to take full advantage of the opportunity.

If he was the only one allowed in who actually knew what was going on, then he had to be there. End of story. Plus, someone should be here if Cisco _did_ wake up before switching rooms. He would have questions, he’d want to know what happened to Snart and he’d need someone to put a hand on his shoulder and remind him not to get up yet even though he’d want to try because he was stubborn like that.

Scratch that earlier thought; Barry wanted him awake _now_.

It was selfish, but Barry wanted proof that Cisco was the same as he was before, that Barry hadn’t screwed everything up by messing with the timeline, or worse, when he’d performed speedforce-powered field surgery on his friend.

He grabbed Cisco’s hand without thinking about it, feeling a now-familiar shot of belated panic. Why had he done it? He’d asked himself that question too many times in the last few days, but never come up with an answer. Because he’d trusted Dr. Wells to know what he was doing? Because Wells had sounded so sure? But how could he be? He’d never seen anything like that happen before; he couldn’t know what Barry could do…

Could he? Barry frowned, running over the words in his head for the hundredth time: _It’s electricity pumping through your veins, crackling through you._ Barry shivered at the reminder. It was so visceral, so real, he’d almost thought for a moment that he was speaking to himself. How could Dr. Wells, no matter how much he’d studied Barry’s physiology in the past months, know what it really felt like?

A beeping sound brought his mind back, and he realized Cisco’s heart-rate was faster than normal. He looked down and found his hand vibrating. _Shit._

He wrenched his hand away, breathing a sigh of relief when Cisco’s heart gradually settled back down. He couldn’t let himself get that upset. Barry looked down and found his hand still vibrating, shaking too hard to be controlled, even as he tried. Just like before.

He glanced back at Cisco, and the hand he’d been holding. It looked normal, just like… Well, his chest still had the bullet wound, but nothing more than that. How was that even possible?

Curiously, Barry moved his vibrating hand back toward Cisco’s side, hovering an inch above the skin of his bare arm. How could he do that; how could he pass through a living thing without causing damage, only moving exactly what he chose to, how did he have that much control, and could he do it again?

The tips of his fingers brushed against skin, and then through it. As soon as he saw his hand start to disappear, he sucked in a shocked breath and wrenched himself back.

Cisco’s heart-rate didn’t change. The skin wasn’t broken. Nothing was different.

What was he thinking? If he wanted to figure this out, he could do that on his own time, but he shouldn’t be messing around and experimenting on his unconscious friend who’d already been through more than enough. At least he hadn’t done any damage. It was almost like it never happened, no mark of what he’d…

 _There’s no wound._ The words came without being called, and for a moment he wasn’t sure why, but then he shot upright in his seat, breathing fast. No wound.

He’d spent plenty of time wondering what it could have been, considering everything from a freak medical incident to Mardon stealing away the atmosphere, but he hadn’t thought of himself, what he could do. Or, what the Reverse-Flash could do, which was everything Barry could do and more. But how… and _why_?

He ignored the first few bars of his ringtone, mind racing far faster than even he could usually manage, but finally he swallowed the terror (because if it was true, how was he supposed to protect Cisco from _that_?) and answered the phone.

“Barry,” Caitlin said, and he almost asked her to call back later, but she didn’t wait for him to say anything. “The tracking signal’s back up, just outside of town. It might be Snart.”

Barry stood up instantly. “He’s back?”

“The tracking signal is back,” Caitlin corrected. “I can’t get a visual on him, it looks like he’s out a few hundred feet from the roads, in the woods. Barry, this could be a trap. It’s probably a trap.”

“I don’t care,” Barry hissed. “I—”

“I wasn’t saying you shouldn’t go. I was just warning you.”

He nodded, even though she couldn’t see it. Of course she wasn’t saying he shouldn’t go; she wanted Snart to pay, too. Maybe Barry would get lucky and Rory would be there as well. “Okay, send me the location. I’m going.” He took a single step toward the door and paused. This was probably a trap, true, but for who? “Uh, if I come and get you, would you…”

“I’ll stay with Cisco,” she assured him, and he breathed more easily. Maybe she couldn’t sit in the room itself, but she would be on alert if anyone suspicious came by. He told her he’d be there in under a minute and hung up.

He paused again in the doorway, wavering on the edge of leaving, and glanced back to Cisco’s bed. He didn’t want to leave. But he definitely did not want to let Snart get away, not if he had the chance to catch him.

“I’ll be back,” he promised. Cisco didn’t answer.

 

 

 

Cassandra stumbled over the doorway to the apartment, sighing as she realized she must be even more tired than she’d thought. She wasn’t exactly fond of overnight shifts, but then she’d gotten dragged into covering Stan’s on top of that, and now she was wondering whether she should grab some lunch before dropping into bed.

She fumbled with the door, trying to get it to lock behind her. She should have just let them call someone else in; she was nearly useless, now. Except, staying late meant she’d been able to find out how that Ramon kid was doing off the ventilator, and that was something worth knowing.

Look, she _knew_ she wasn’t supposed to get attached.

It was just, well, while Colin had been giving her updates on Ramon’s condition, he’d also mentioned a certain young man who’d come around every day. Ramon’s partner, apparently. And Cassandra wasn’t a fool, nor was she so bad at reading people that she’d miss something so obvious. She knew who the partner was, and only her exceptionally strong (and annoying) sense of the importance of privacy had held her back from begging Colin for the man’s name and ruining the Flash’s secret identity.

It wasn’t like she’d been planning to spread it around, but it wasn’t her secret to take, even for herself. But damn, was she curious (and he hadn’t made it hard for her to figure out, boy, she hoped he was more discreet most of the time, when his partner wasn’t getting shot). So, yes, she’d kept up on how Ramon was doing. So sue her. She was _trying_ to keep her distance.

Finally, she got the door properly locked behind her, and turned back to the apartment, jumping when she found someone watching her from the kitchen. “Andie! Jesus, you scared me. How long have you been watching me struggle with that door?”

“Aw, you got it eventually.” Andie winked, holding up a plate with a burrito on it, probably full of the leftover tempah from last night, mmm. “Besides, I was getting this together for you.”

“You’re an angel,” Cassandra sighed, accepting the plate and the kiss Andie left on her cheek in the same motion.

They sat together at the table, even though Andie had already eaten her lunch at a much more reasonable time. Cassandra bolted through her own, so Andie had to do most of the talking. Soon enough, Andie was shooing her toward the bedroom. “Get some sleep,” she insisted. “You look dead on your feet.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Cassandra sighed as she hit the bed, snuggling deep into the covers, but she realized a moment later that she still didn’t feel all the warm.

It was Ramon, and his partner, the thoughts following her home from work in that way that reminded her exactly why she never got attached to patients. Because there lay the danger of leaving work and still wondering how they were doing, when they would wake up, if their families were dealing with it alright....

“Hey, Andie?”

Andie peaked her head back in through the doorway. “Yeah?”

“Come lay down for a bit?”

Andie paused, but only for a moment, and then she was walking over and slipping into bed beside Cassandra. She buried herself under the covers and let Cassandra mold into her side. Ah, finally. This was what she’d been waiting for. Andie chuckled. “Goodnight, dear.”

Cassandra mumbled something that probably would have been a ‘goodnight’ if she’d been more awake, but she was already drifting off.

 

 

 

He’d been wandering the same halls for what felt like days. It was a maze, unconquerable no matter how many times he mapped out the patterns in his head and tried to find the exit. It always dumped him back into the same room. He was trying the left-hand trick for at least the tenth time, keeping his fingers against the wall at every turn, but he didn’t expect it to make a difference (so maybe he was lost, but he hadn’t yet lost his mind).

Cisco rounded a corner and found himself in the Room, the wall vanishing from under his hand like it had never been there to begin with.

He gritted his teeth, scanning hurriedly around him. This wasn’t right; there should have been a door. There should _still_ be a door, one that led back into the halls if not one that could take him outside. But even as he searched, the location of the doors, the sight of the walls, even the idea of finding a way out at all slipped away from him, replaced by a man walking slowly toward him, clapping.

‘ _You’re incredibly clever, Cisco. I’ve always said so._ ’

‘ _You’re him._ ’ From outside his body, Cisco saw himself say the words. From inside his body, he felt his lips move. From somewhere else, he heard the vibrations clash against a barrier and bounce back, stuck. ‘ _The Reverse-Flash._ ’

The man smiled. Cisco couldn’t remember his name. ‘ _You and I have never been truly, properly introduced. I am Eobard Thawne._ ’ No, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t it.

He listened to the man talk: the man without a name, without a _face_ , this wasn’t his face, features laying over his bones like a mask. His words were familiar and also not, like the film version of a book read a dozen times over. He held up one finger and split himself in half.

Both sides were the same, like a mirror image, and that was wrong. They were two people and they shouldn’t look the same. Cisco took a step closer, struggling to find the difference, like a puzzle in a children’s magazine. For just a moment, he thought he spotted it, one of the faces morphing into something else, just as familiar, but younger, brighter…

Then it blurred as the halves came back together. Just a mirage.

‘ _I was there to kill Barry,_ ’ the man said, and the name sparked something.

‘ _Why?_ ’ Even though he knew, but he didn’t remember until the man answered him.

‘ _Because I have been stuck here._ ’

Weren’t they all?

Stuck.

‘ _I can help you,_ ’ he said, a lie that felt true, though he couldn’t even help himself out of this place. It didn’t matter. The man didn’t believe him. That was okay; Cisco didn’t believe most of what the man was saying, either.

When he spoke again, he opened one mouth, and two voices came out:

‘ _Do you know how hard it has been—_ ’

‘ _He’s coughing blood._ ’

‘ _I’ve grown quite fond of you._ ’

‘ _There has to be something I can—_ ’

‘ _And in many ways—_ ’

‘ _No, I don’t know how._ ’

‘ _You have shown me what it’s like to have a son._ ’

He knew what was coming. He’d seen it coming a hundred, thousand times, but he couldn’t move away.

There was an explosion in his chest, a rattling fire that shook his bones and ground his teeth together. He glanced down, found an arm that wasn’t his that ended halfway against his chest, embedded in his torso. He tried to push it away but his hands were black, useless. He waited for the man to ask for something.

‘ _I’m sorry,_ ’ came the wrong voice, soft and wrecked.

Cisco looked up and found the face that the man had been hiding this whole time.

‘ _Barry,_ ’ he gasped, and felt his friend wrench a hand inside his chest, push in and then pull back, out of him completely, and he was falling, falling, until he hit the flo—

He was in a familiar hallway, and he knew he wouldn’t find a way out. He’d end up in that same room, where he knew what happened but couldn’t remember until the moment it did. He started walking.

 

 

 

Barry hadn’t expected to find Snart standing right where the signal said he would be. He stopped himself from tackling Snart outright and skidded to a stop several yards away, because this whole thing still rang _trap_ loud and clear. As if to prove it, Snart smirked at him, and Barry bristled.

“You have a lot of nerve, sticking around this long.”

“Aw, you know you would’ve been disappointed if you didn’t get to see me again,” Snart drawled.

Well, he wasn’t wrong. “How well do you think this is going to go for you, Snart?”

“At least as well as it could go for you, _Barry_.”

Barry froze. How…

“Not too hard to put it together,” Snart said, answering the unspoken question. “We were only checking up on how Cisco was doing and we found there was this this one guy coming around every day to visit, his partner, who Lisa said looked an awful lot like the ‘blind date’ from the bar the other night. Which makes him either a stalker, or a guy who just so happens to have the same voice and description as our city’s favorite pet hero.”

Barry’s mind raced. He had to think of something; there had to be something he could do to fix this. But if Snart already knew... and who else had he told by now? And he’d been _watching_ them, Barry thought with a shiver. He’d been right, not to leave Cisco alone.

“Of course, we couldn’t be completely sure, not until we saw how you’d react to the name.” Snart shook his head. “I’m a little disappointed. You make it too easy, considering the lengths your boyfriend went to to keep it a secret.”

The words jolted Barry. Everything they knew about what had happened was educated guesswork based on Snart’s commentary and the weapons he carried, but this was different. Was _that_ the reason why Cisco was...

Barry gave up any pretense of calm. In a second, he was inches away from Snart, staring him down. He didn’t touch him, couldn’t let himself with this much rage boiling in his stomach and no one in his ear to talk him down, but he appeared so suddenly that Snart was forced to step back, anyway. “Stay away from him,” he hissed.

But Snart wasn’t willing to let go of the upper hand, not completely. “And how are you going to make sure of that?” he asked. “Can’t really hold me down when I can just tell everyone who you really are.”

“I can speed you to my own private prison where you’ll never see the light of day,” Barry threatened. Snart had already proven he could break out of a regular jail cell; maybe it was time to take things to the next level. “You and your friends.”

Snart frowned at the mention of the others, but didn’t lose confidence. “You could, but then I won't be around to stop my own private uplink that'll broadcast your identity to the world. So, the million dollar question. What to do with me now, Barry Allen?”

That _was_ the question, wasn’t it? Every atom of Barry rebelled against the idea of letting Snart walk free, but the consequences of doing so were too much to handle. If his identity got out, it wouldn’t just be his own life on the line; it would be everyone around him. Everything that they had gone through with Cisco in the past few days, that would happen again, and again, and again.

But Snart wasn’t willing to give an inch. Wasn’t willing to stop stealing, wouldn’t even agree to move to a new city. The only thing Barry could get him to fold on was to put an end to any killing.

“And if you, or anyone in your Rogues' gallery goes near any of my friends or family again, I don't care who you tell my identity to. I'm putting you away.”

“I guess your secret's safe Flash. For now.” God, this was the worst plan he’d ever had.

“One more thing,” Barry said, before Snart could think they were done. “This deal, it only goes for you and your sister. Mick Rory isn’t a part of it. He goes to jail.” Snart and his sister might have found out his secret, but Rory didn’t, and he’d already proven he couldn’t be trusted.

Snart’s jaw clenched. He looked frustrated for the first time today. “Mick’s part of my team.”

“He shot Cisco.”

“That was…” Snart paused. “Not our intention. Things got out of hand. We had meant to return him to you, perhaps a little worse for the wear, but…”

“Part of our deal is not killing anyone.” Barry spoke over him. He didn’t really care what half-assed excuses Snart had. “Cisco nearly died. He _should_ have died, and you’re very lucky he didn’t. How do you expect me to believe Mick won’t do the same thing next week?”

Snart was silent for a moment, gaze flicking back and forth between Barry’s eyes. “We have a bit of disposable income right now,” he said finally, “thanks to a certain crime family generous enough to share. Might even be enough for a vacation of sorts. Maybe a few months out of town.”

“Long enough to get your team sorted out?”

Snart nodded. Good enough.

“Make it a long vacation,” Barry said. “And I’m not kidding; if I see you or yours on the same _street_ as anyone I care about, deal’s off. Nothing about your uplink will change the fact that you’ll be stuck in a jail cell for the rest of your life.”

He left before Snart could argue, breathing hard. It was a terrible, awful deal, but it was the best he could do. He just hoped Cisco forgave him when the Snarts wandered back into town in a few months.

From inside STAR labs, changing out of his suit, he gave Caitlin a call. Sure, he’d be at the hospital in another minute, but she wouldn’t mind some warning. “Hey, Cait, Snart was there. We need to keep an eye out, he’s supposed to be ducking out of town—”

“Barry,” she interrupted him, sounding frantic, and he froze, mind shooting back to the last time she’d sounded like that, the time that didn’t exist anymore. He’d only been gone for twenty minutes, oh God, what could have happened… “Barry. Cisco’s awake.”

 


	7. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally: the end! This turned out about as long as a regular chapter, but I'm still resolutely calling it an epilogue. Thanks to everyone who's stuck with the story for this long; I hope you've enjoyed it!

Barry dropped the mask to the ground beside yet another ordinary criminal. He should have known; Snart would never hide his face. Ignoring the unmasked man’s weakened threats and snarls, Barry grabbed him by the arms and hauled him off to the station.

He gave his report to the cop at the front desk, clearly a rookie by the way he gasped loudly at the Flash’s arrival. “Caught him in the jewelry store on fifth. There should be a video.” He’d made sure to remove the thief’s mask in front of a blinking security camera, after all. With his part done, Barry left the man in the mostly-capable hands of the baby cop and ran off, grumbling into his mic.

“Is that really the _only_ thing happening tonight? The guy wearing sweatpants and a Captain America mask? I mean, come on.”

“Captain America, really?” There was some shuffling over the line, then Cisco’s voice returned. “Hang on, lemme check it off. We’re only missing Black Widow and Thor, now.”

“Black Widow doesn’t wear a mask,” Caitlin said.

“Red wig,” Cisco countered. “We’re looking for a red wig, chin-length or better.”

Barry interrupted them before they could argue the point further. “Are you sure that’s all there is tonight? Caitlin? There’s nothing… else?”

“It looks pretty quiet,” Caitlin said, while Cisco laughed and added something the mic didn’t quite pick up. “Try running a grid; I’ll check around again. No, I said _I’ll_ do it, Cisco. Sit back down.”

While he waited, Barry ran through the streets and alleys of Central City, looking for anything even slightly unusual. He found some jaywalkers, a group of probably-underage drinkers, but nothing that needed his attention. If he went a little further than usual, skirting into the suburbs, then he was just being thorough. Still, he’d found nothing of note by the time the mic cracked to life and Caitlin gave him the all-clear.

“Are you sure? What about—”

“There’s nothing. Call it a night.”

“...Is Cisco there?”

Caitlin sighed. “No. I stepped outside.”

Barry’s focus shifted gears in an instant. “You left him alone?”

“Of course not.” Caitlin sounded offended at the suggestion. “Iris stopped by; she’s in with him right now. And I’m just out in the hall.”

“Good, good. So there’s… no sign of them? At all?” He’d stopped along the side of a quiet street, attention entirely on the conversation coming through his earpiece.

“No, Barry. It looks like Snart was telling the truth. They’re probably long gone by now, and I’m sure they know better than to show up here for a while. We can keep checking the national news, but…”

“But they probably won’t be there, either.” Barry rubbed a hand over his forehead. “I should have just grabbed them right there.They were all _right there_.”

Caitlin answered immediately, and more sharply than before. “If you’d done that, he would have died.”

“Then later, when Snart was alone. It shouldn’t have mattered what he threatened; I knew he was too dangerous to walk around free.”

Caitlin didn’t agree with him, but she didn’t argue, either. “Come back in, Barry,” she said instead.

Barry fidgeted, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Maybe I should stay out a little longer. It’s not that late, yet.”

“Hospital visitation hours are almost over,” Caitlin reminded him, “and you know you’re the only one they’ll let stay overnight.”

So Barry turned around and headed back to STAR labs to change, stopping only long enough to grab his wallet and let Dr. Wells know where he was going. (“Take this with you, then, would you Barry? And don’t let Dr. Snow see, I’m sure she wouldn’t approve.”) A minute later, he was at the hospital, taking the hallways and staircases at normal speed so he wouldn’t attract attention. He stopped outside the door to Cisco’s room and took a deep breath.

‘ _He wants to see you. He’s asked to see you._ ’

He knocked, for warning more than permission, and opened the door.

“Barry! Hey, man!” Cisco’s smile was blinding as he sat up to greet him properly. Barry was sure he was the only one who saw the gesture for what it was: giving up his comfortable, careless posture and getting ready to move. He waited until some of the tension had fallen from Cisco’s shoulders before he stepped forward.

“Hey yourself.” Barry plastered on a smile of his own. “What’s the news? Anything good?”

Cisco groaned theatrically, making a motion like he was going to collapse backward but not following through. “‘A couple more days,’ they said, like they haven’t said it every day this week. I’m telling you, if they haven’t figured their shit out by tomorrow, I am checking myself out anyway, with or without doctor approval.”

Caitlin frowned. “You’re not checking out without _this_ doctor’s approval, I can tell you that.”

“You already ran your own tests and you said they came back normal!”

“ _Not_ ,” she said, jabbing a finger toward his chest that stopped short of hitting the bandages, “until I say so.”

“Are you going home tonight?” Barry asked Iris softly, as the others argued.

“I am. The more lucid Eddie gets, the more he tells me to eat and shower and sleep at the apartment…”

Barry grinned. “Isn’t it so annoying to have someone care about your well-being?”

“Right?” she agreed, rolling her eyes dramatically. “Anyway, I see you haven’t been subjected to the same inconvenience.”

“We can’t leave him alone, Iris.” It wasn’t the first time he’d said it. His voice was barely audible, now, hissed behind his hand so that Cisco couldn’t hear them. “You know his family isn’t going to stay overnight.” Nor did they know enough to protect him, but Barry didn’t say that.

Iris looked like she was about to argue, then glanced over at Cisco, who was gesturing with heavily bandaged fingers and coughing every so often when speaking irritated his chest. “I wish you would tell me what happened. I mean, really. Not just the short version.”

“Your dad knows,” Barry promised, though he wasn’t sure whether it was more reassuring or frustrating. “The police know everything they need to go after them.”

Iris sighed. “Take care of him, then.” She stood up to hug him goodbye as Caitlin and Cisco’s discussion came to an end. Or, more accurately, an unconditional surrender.

Cisco held up his hands. “Fine, fine. But soon, yeah? Or I’m gonna go crazy in here.”

“Soon,” Caitlin said, and went in for a very careful hug. Iris did the same, which Barry hadn’t expected. How much time had they been spending together, lately? Maybe a lot, given how often Iris was in the hospital, though she had gone back to work now that Eddie was doing better.

Caitlin caught Barry’s eye on her way out and shot him a look that clearly said, ‘ _sit down, don’t be weird._ ’ She didn’t believe him, that things were different when he and Cisco were alone. It was enough that Barry worried the nurses would call his bluff on the whole ‘partners’ story. As soon as the door closed on the two of them, the silence got a hundred times louder.

“So,” Barry said finally, taking a seat and wondering if he was reading too much into the way Cisco drew his arms in a bit closer when he did. “You’re… good?”

Cisco shrugged. “Same as I was earlier.”

“Good.” Chewing his lip, Barry cast his eyes around for another topic of conversation. There was a plastic bottle of grape soda sitting on the table by the bed. He pointed at it. “I thought you didn’t like grape.”

“Dante brought it by earlier.” Cisco smiled, not as wide as before but more sincere. “I don’t think he remembers what I like to drink, but.” He shrugged. “Thought that counts, right?”

“Oh! That reminds me!” Barry dug into his jacket, retrieving a thin device and a stylus. “Dr. Wells asked me to give this to you.”

Cisco’s eyes lit up instantly. “Oh, thank God,” he sighed. “Caitlin’s been holding out on me. She thinks I need 23 hours of sleep a day, but I keep telling her what I need is to get some work done.” He opened the device in slow but familiar motions, unfolding it two or three times more than Barry would have expected until he had a weird, probably self-designed laptop laid out in front of him. “Finally.”

Within minutes, Cisco was completely absorbed in the screens, navigating through them with his stiff fingers wrapped clumsily around the stylus. He didn’t seemed bothered at all by Barry’s presence, now. In fact, Barry doubted that a crane taking out the far wall would have bothered him. Barry left him to it and pulled out some work of his own.

‘ _Wells: A Biography_ ’

Six hundred pages about the man who built the particle accelerator and, as far as Barry could tell so far, very little information. He could have read the whole thing through at hyperspeed, but his long-term memory of text read that way wasn’t great, and he didn’t want to miss anything. Plus, it gave him something to fill in the long, quiet evening hours when he and Cisco did anything but talk to each other.

So he took his time, committing each word to memory and sometimes going back to repeat a chapter or two. There had to be something in here, there just had to be, to explain why Dr. Wells knew exactly what it felt like to be shot through with lightning.

Either that, or something that might explain why he wanted Barry’s mother dead.

No, it couldn’t be that. Barry blinked hard, blurring the words in front of him. His mind turned back and forth too often, probably faster than the average person was capable of, and of all the abilities his speed had granted him, extreme indecision had to be the worst. Sometimes Dr. Wells leaned over his shoulder to point something out on a screen, and it was exactly like it had always been; sometimes he smiled and Barry felt he hardly knew the man.

It didn’t help that the two most persistent theories — that Dr. Wells might have something to do with, might even _be_ the Man in Yellow, and that the Reverse Flash had killed Cisco in the other timeline — were completely at odds with each other. Barry could not reconcile the Dr. Wells who had worked so hard to save Cisco’s life with someone who would so carelessly deal the final blow.

Barry shook himself away from those thoughts, glancing at Cisco to find him very much alive but drifting toward sleep. It made him nauseous to dwell on this subject for too long — something else that didn’t bode well for coming to any conclusions.

He missed the days when Cisco was always asleep, awful as that sounded. Then, he could just reach out whenever he needed comfort, taking Cisco’s wrist to feel the steady heartbeat. These days, it barely took a brush of skin and Cisco would flinch back, only half-heartedly attempting to disguise the motion as a shift of position. And Barry couldn’t even blame him.

Just his luck, Barry thought. In the timeline where everything had gone to shit, the one bright spot had been kissing Iris by the pier. Now he’d managed to get out with everyone’s lives intact, even indulged the idea of wanting someone else, and they didn’t even want to touch him.

Satisfying himself with the sight of Cisco’s chest rising and falling in a mostly steady rhythm, Barry reminded himself to be grateful for this, at least, and turned back to his book. It was nearly two hours before he looked up again, this time because of a soft shuffling noise from the bed.

Cisco was breathing faster than before, hands twitching at the edges of the blanket, eyebrows furrowed. It was a familiar sight, though Barry had no way of knowing whether it had been a pattern before he’d spent a day with the Snarts, or if it was entirely new. He _had_ seen it enough to know the dream was more violent than it looked. Cisco moved a lot in his sleep, but nightmares kept him weirdly still.

“Hey,” Barry said, just as he had every other time Cisco had started shaking at night. “Cisco. Wake up, man.” He leaned in closer, raising his voice when Cisco didn’t respond. “Wake up. Cisco.”

Still nothing. Cisco stayed asleep, face darkening by the second as his eyes jerked beneath their lids. Barry slid a little closer to the edge of his chair. He had let a nightmare run its natural course exactly once before, and it was enough to convince him: never again.

“ _Cisco_.” When no reasonable volume woke him, Barry gave up, reached forward, and lay his hand on Cisco’s arm.

The effect was immediate: Cisco’s eyes flew open and he jerked himself up, then to the other side of the bed. “Don’t,” he said, in a voice too hoarse for someone who hadn’t woken up screaming. After a moment, he seemed to recognize where he was and leaned forward to catch his breath. He clutched his chest, somewhere down and to the left of where the bullet had gone in.

“Sorry,” he said eventually, when his breathing was more steady.

“Don’t be,” Barry replied immediately. He was back in his chair, having retreated so quickly his book had fallen to the floor. It was probably ruining the spine. “Are you okay?”

“Sure. Fine.” Cisco smoothed down his blankets, avoiding Barry’s eyes. “Did I wake you up?”

Barry shook his head. If he’d been sleeping, he probably wouldn’t have noticed at all. “I was reading.”

“Oh.” Cisco didn’t ask what he was reading, or even glance down toward the book lying on the ground. It was the one part of his disinterest that Barry was actually grateful for, since it meant he didn’t have to explain why he was so interested in Wells.

“You can go back to sleep,” Barry said, when it was clear the conversation would not continue. “Sorry.”

Cisco snorted. “ _You’re_ sorry? What for?”

Taken aback, Barry blinked. He’d meant that he was sorry for disturbing Cisco’s sleep so violently, but, well, if Cisco was really _asking_... “For this,” he said, gesturing to the hospital bed. “For everything. It’s because of me.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Of course it is,” Barry tried to say, but Cisco spoke over him.

“Besides, I’m the one who should be sorry.”

Barry laughed, which he realized was the wrong reaction when Cisco grimaced. “It… _why_?”

“I built that gun,” Cisco said miserably. “I promised I’d never do something like that again, and it didn’t even take them ten minutes to convince me.” He curled in on himself, and Barry recognized the motion, realized he’d been thinking about this since he’d woken up. “I wouldn’t have, I swear, but. Cold already had his gun back and he. He was going to k—”

“Cisco, no, Jesus,” Barry interrupted quickly, as Cisco’s voice faltered. “I’m glad you did. Something like that, it’s not worth your life.”

“Not _my_... They could’ve killed _me_.” He looked at Barry insistently, like this was a promise he needed to make instead of the second most terrifying thing Barry had ever heard. “It was… fuck, I don’t even remember his name, now. I couldn’t watch him die.”

“It’s fine,” Barry assured him, even though it wasn’t, really, that he valued his own life so little. “It’s fine.”

“Did anyone die? The gold gun, did it kill anyone?”

Barry considered lying, but only briefly. “Yes. She killed someone. Just one.” Like that wasn’t already too much. “But that’s not your fault,” he added, when Cisco’s expression crumpled. “It’s hers. It’s mine. I should have been there sooner.”

“You saved everyone else.” Cisco stared down at his hands. “You got there as fast as you could—”

“I meant _you_ ,” Barry said, now entirely too loud for a hospital at midnight. “I should have known something was wrong. I should’ve— just walked you home, then they wouldn’t have gotten to you at all, I don’t know why I left you alone…”

“Because I’m a grown-ass man and I don’t need a bodyguard?” Cisco said irritably.

Barry went to shake his head, managed only a single jerk to one side. “It’s my job to protect you if people are after you _because of me_.”

“They were after me because I made those guns.”

“Really?”

Silence, as Cisco searched for an answer. Barry already knew it, even though he and Cisco hadn’t yet talked about it directly. The weapons were part of it, sure, but they could have given Lisa a handgun instead. It would have been plenty deadly, if not as flashy. Something else had made it all worth the risk.

“No,” Cisco admitted finally. “They wanted to know who the Flash was. They thought I’d tell them. I didn’t,” he added, unnecessarily.

“I know. I did.”

He watched the shock grow on Cisco’s face and felt a little guilty for it, but this was important, if Snart and Rory ever did show up again. He didn’t mention how, exactly, he’d ‘told’ Snart who he was; Cisco would only feel worse.

“Wha— Why the _hell_ would you—”

“Because it wasn’t important,” Barry answered, firm and steady. He was sure about this part. “Not compared to— I’d do it again. I told you, this is all on me. I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

“That’s stupid.” Cisco dismissed it carelessly, like Barry was some five-year-old kid running away from home because his parents hadn’t let him watch television. “So now they know anyway,” he continued, starting to sound frustrated, “and you still want me to believe you’re not pissed off to hell and back?”

“Like you’re not upset?” Barry countered. “Like you’re just _totally fine_ with being kidnapped and _shot_ because some criminals wanted to get to _me_?” He was yelling, now. They were both yelling.

“I _am_. I’m not. I mean.” Cisco clenched his fists into the blanket so hard it must have hurt his healing fingers. “I’m not mad at you,” he finished, though the words themselves sounded angry.

“Well, I’m not mad at _you_ ,” Barry said.

“Great.” Cisco rolled his eyes upward with a scoff. “So where does _that_ leave us?”

“I don’t know.”

The last word echoed oddly around them, where things were peaceful for the first time in minutes. No one had come to check on them, Barry realized, even though they’d both been shouting without restraint. The room was eerily quiet, like the building was empty around them.

Maybe it was just the sense of relief. Cisco didn’t hate him. Had he just been exaggerating things? Projecting his own fears onto Cisco’s very reasonable response to trauma? He chanced reaching out once more. Cisco watched him move closer and said nothing, but as soon as their hands touched, he jerked away.

Ah.

“Sorry,” Cisco said. He wasn’t looking at Barry.

Barry swallowed. “I thought you weren’t—”

“I’m not.”

“Then, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t _know_.” Cisco lifted a hand uselessly and let it fall back down against the bed. “I honestly have no idea. Trust me, I’d _like_ to give you a hug right now—” Barry’s heart leapt “—but it’s like the signal gets stuck in my brain and I can’t. It’s like..”

He struggled for words, and Barry waited, hands clenched into the knees of his pants so that they didn’t roam.

“It’s like my body thinks you’re dangerous. But _I_ don’t,” he added hastily, when Barry couldn’t keep the disappointment off his face. Cisco grimaced and gestured to his head. “Something’s mixed up. I dunno, maybe if I didn’t keep having those dreams…”

Again, Barry waited, wondering if Cisco might actually tell him about what he saw every night. He always said he couldn’t remember, and Barry could never tell if he was lying.

But when he spoke, he seemed to have jumped topics completely. “If I ask you something, can you promise me you’ll tell me the truth?”

“Yes,” Barry answered immediately, desperate for anything that might fix this. “Absolutely, yes.”

“You keep saying you shouldn’t have left me alone.” Cisco bit his lip, looking directly into Barry’s eyes for the first time since he’d woken. Barry nodded. “And I know guilt-tripping yourself is like, your favorite hobby or whatever, but you couldn’t’ve _really_ known something was going to happen that night. Could you?”

Barry let out a slow breath. This was always going to happen eventually; he’d known that since he’d told Caitlin and Wells. “The morning that I went back, we hadn’t caught Mardon yet.” He shut his eyes for a moment and reminded himself that nothing he would say was real anymore. “He took Joe, had him on the pier, or at least he said he did. Before I could get close, he started building up this wave. I didn’t know how to stop it, it was way too big, so I called Caitlin. She was upset when she answered the phone. She’d come into the lab to look for you, but you were…” He shivered, even though the room wasn’t cold.

“Missing?” Cisco said, probably trying to spare Barry from saying it himself.

Barry shook his head. “Dead.”

Cisco paused, mouth open. He blinked. “Oh.”

“I thought it was Mardon, at first, but then I took care of him and now I don’t… I didn’t even hear anything about the Snarts the first time around, and anyway it couldn’t have been them.” Not that he’d put it past them, obviously, but it was clear they would have left marks.

Cisco listened, nodded, and then asked, “Where?”

“‘Where’ what?”

“Where’d she find me? Where did I die?”

“Um. The lab?” Hadn’t he said that?

“Right, right,” Cisco said, coming to terms with his own death awfully quickly. “But which room?”

“Which _room_?” Barry repeated. His ability to speak without question marks seemed to be long gone. “Why does that— Caitlin didn’t say. She just said you were there early looking into something about Dr. Wells. Or for Dr. Wells. I don’t know.” That was a lie; he did know. It just sounded bad to say it.

But Cisco’s eyes had widened, lit up like he was finally understanding some of this. His eyes flicked down to the book on the floor. “How?” he asked, more eagerly than before. “I know you don’t know who it was, but what happened?”

“Cisco.” Barry leaned in and put both hands on the plastic railing of the bed, as close as he could get without pushing Cisco backwards. “We stopped it, okay? And I’m so sorry that… this happened, instead, but you’re not going to die. I promise, I won’t let that happen.”

“I know that,” Cisco said. The amount of plain faith in the words made Barry catch his breath. “I’m just asking what _would_ have happened.”

“Okay.” Barry wished all over again that he’d gotten more information from that call, because all he had was what it _wasn’t_. “I mean, I don’t really know. I didn’t see you. Caitlin couldn’t tell what it was; she said there weren’t any marks, you were just lying there…” He licked his lips, which had become far too dry in the last minute. “I was going to find her after I stopped Mardon, but something happened while I was running, trying to block the wave, and then I was, you know, back. Two days ago. And you were fine.”

‘Fine’ had become a relative term, now. Cisco was ‘fine’ lying here in a hospital bed with a hole in his chest and discolored fingers, as long as he was breathing. As long as the universe didn’t decide this still wasn’t enough and it would have to try again.

No, he wouldn’t let that happen. He’s already fixed things once; he could do it again, if he needed to. And again and again until the universe gave up and left well enough alone.

“Please don’t,” Cisco said softly, and Barry looked up, startled, to find him on the far side of the bed, staring at Barry’s hands. They had broken out into short bursts of vibrations, Barry realized. With a deep breath, he released the tension and stilled them, letting them fall against his legs.

Cisco didn’t calm himself as easily. His muscles stayed locked, body tilted determinately away from Barry. ‘ _It’s like my body thinks you’re dangerous,_ ’ he’d said.

“Is that what the problem is?” Barry tried not to sound hurt or accusing or anything else in particular.

Cisco didn’t say yes, but he looked embarrassed enough that it was clear. With obvious effort, he unfolded his arms from across his chest and placed them at his sides.

“Do you want me to leave?” Barry asked calmly. He would, if Cisco asked.

Without hesitation, Cisco shook his head.

“Okay.” Slowly, Barry held out his hands, palms up, just a few inches over the bed. He held them steady, so Cisco could see. Cisco watched them for a moment.

Then, he reached forward and grabbed Barry’s left hand tightly between both of his own, pulling it down to rest against his leg so that it was trapped from all sides. He let out a deep breath, squeezing as tightly as he could through the bandaging.

Despite everything, Barry had to work not to smile as he returned the pressure gently. He pulled his other hand back onto his lap.

“I think,” Cisco said, after a long minute where the contact between them sparked and settled, “I should tell you about my dreams.”


End file.
